"The Brutal Art" by Jesse Kellerman

New York Gallery Owner Ethan Muller is alienated from his multi-millionaire property developer father. He discovers boxes of drawings by unknown (and disappeared) art genius Victor Cracke. But they contain a deadly secret: five cherubs bear the faces of raped and murdered schoolboys. And so the gallery owner teams up with law enforcement to track down the mystery of Victor Cracke.

A brilliant thriller in which the past impinges fatally upon the present.

Great lines:

• "When my father builds a bridge, you can bet there's going to be a toll on it." (p 7)
• "Marilyn eats like an ex-convict: hunched over, in perpetual fear that her food will be taken away, and when she pauses it's not with satiety but with relief. Eight siblings and you learn to protect yourself." (p 53)
• "The wetness of the English weather aligned with my adolescent sense of impending doom, and the dryness of English humor made more sense to me than the rampant goofiness of American pop culture." (p 67)
• "Art is either plagiarism or revolution" (p 92)
• "Pure evil isn't very interesting; it has no depth." (p 95)
• "we are, by design or fluke, a curious species." (p 161)
• "She looks like a monster ... with blotchy cheeks and bony fingers and a nightcap sitting high on her head, like brains swelling out of a broken skull." (p 178)
• "Rich men get rich in the first place because they never lose that lust for the kill." (p 210)
• "she believed that right and wrong had no expiration date." (p 238)

September 2018; 404 pages