The Last Mona Lisa

“As Luke [the protagonist] dives farther into his ancestor’s mind, we dive with him, hoping to exonerate the simple crook while admiring his bravado. We also take pause to consider complex questions about the value of art for the individual as well as for society.” In 1911, a Louvre worker took the Mona Lisa off the wall and absconded with it. Vincenzo Perrone kept the painting for more than two years. After returning to Italy, he contacted authorities, claiming he had committed an act of nationalism by bringing the painting back to the home of its creator, Leonardo da Vinci. These facts are documented in multiple sources, including the 2012 Joe Medeiros film The Missing Piece: Mona Lisa, Her Thief, The True Story. Writer and artist Jonathan Santlofer uses this robbery as the backdrop for his new novel. He creates a fictional grandson protagonist, Luke Perrone, and sends him on a quest to find the … Read more

Into the pantheon of great art heist stories leaps The Last Mona Lisa, Jonathan Santlofer’s novel of intrigue, romance and murder. Its set in Florence, Paris and New York and centered on a cast of art scholars, forgers and–those most nefarious of public servants–librarians. One day, New Yorker Luke Perrone receives a curious e-mail from Italy: before his “sudden death,” a professor requested that Luke be contacted about a recent discovery–“what may have been your great-grandfather’s journal,” which is now at Florence’s Laurentian Library. Luke, a painter and assistant art professor, has spent two decades researching Vincent Peruggia, “my family’s most infamous criminal,” the man behind the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Luke is only too happy to cross the pond and hunker down at the library, unaware that at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, a criminal intelligence analyst has him under communication surveillance Read more here at Shelf Awareness…