An art dealer in his twenties, Jimmy LaGrange, is found beaten to death in his apartment just after the find of his life has been consigned to auction. Word spreads at a New York auction house and two ladies, Coleman and Dinah Greene, speculate sadly as to what could have gone wrong and whether it had any connection to art. Coleman has a problem: she runs a magazine called 'Art Smart', but many of their ideas are being stolen by other titles. She doesn't want to tell her cousin Dinah, who has her own struggle to keep an art gallery open, and she fears the leak is one of her two longest-standing staff members.

RESTRIKE refers to a fine art print, later than the first edition. Dinah is well-versed in such matters and she snaps up a couple of items at auction, the buyers from MOMA and other museums having left after the star offering was sold. But Dinah can't hide her trepidation at her lack of trade, and her possessive husband doesn't want her to move to a better location. A new print museum in town seems a likely prospect and she tries to get an introduction to the man who wants to open it. An advisor on fine art to the police, Robert Mondelli, asks for a meeting with Coleman to discuss the connection between the dead art dealer and her gallery. Since Jimmy hadn't owned the valuable work he consigned to sale, who did? Coleman has more questions than answers, and the police think it was a date gone wrong, but Coleman is sure that the timing of Jimmy's death is too much of a coincidence.

There's lots of good detail about the middle-ground art world; the prints by lesser-known women from the early 1900s which find buyers, the work of identification and authentication when a discovery is made. The two Greene girls meanwhile come across as very real women, picking their way through the minefield of business and relationships, saddened that two weeks after Jimmy's death he has almost been forgotten by the fast-moving city crowd.

The side issues keep us reading and the mystery deepens. Reba White Williams has done a skillful job with this tale and the connections keep being made right to the end. RESTRIKE is a detailed mystery for art lovers and people who enjoy learning something new.

Book Summary

Money and murder go hand in glove in the rarified art world of Reba WhiteWilliams's exciting first novel, Restrike. Cousins Coleman and Dinah Greene moved from North Carolina to New York after college to make their mark on the art world: Coleman is the editor of an influential arts magazine and Dinah is the owner of a print gallery in Greenwich Village. But their challenges are mounting as one of Coleman's writers is discovered selling story ideas to a competitor and The Greene Gallery is in the red because sales are down.

When billionaire Heyward Bain arrives with a glamorous assistant, announcing plans to fund a fine print museum, Coleman is intrigued and plans to get to know Bain and publish an article about him. Dinah hopes to sell him enough prints to save her gallery. At the same time, swindlers, attracted by Bain’s lavish spending, invade the print world to grab some of his money.

When a print dealer dies in peculiar circumstances, Coleman is suspicious, but she can’t persuade the NYPD crime investigator of a connection between the dealer’s death and Bain’s buying spree. After one of Coleman’s editors is killed and Coleman is attacked, the police must acknowledge the connection, and Coleman becomes even more determined to discover the truth about Bain. In an unforgettable final scene,Coleman risks her life to expose the last deception threatening her, her friends, and the formerly tranquil print world.