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The Portrait Of Mrs Charbuque by Jeffrey
Ford check out website: www.toruk.com
Piambo is a society painter who mixes, if not with the great and the good, then with the rich and the greedy. He is becoming somewhat weary of painting their unattractive wives and children. So, when he is offered a very strange commission to paint the portrait of a woman, Mrs Charbuque, whom he is not allowed to see, he jumps at the opportunity.
Although he is not permitted to see her he can call upon her daily and talk through a screen so as he can form a mental picture of her in his mind. He is excited by the novel commission and intrigued by his patroness and her apparently blind butler. His friend, Shenz, a fellow artist helps him find information about the mysterious Mrs Charbuque. Events unfold against the background of Victorian New York and a series of gruesome murders of women. Piambo is also threatened by a man claiming to be Mr Charbuque, the supposedly dead husband of his subject. Gradually, the mystery unfolds until finally the whole complex story is revealed. I enjoyed this book. It must have been quite a difficult feat to write such a story from a single first person viewpoint but Jeffrey Ford succeeds admirably. He also delicately paints in the background of a late Victorian city and its urban society enriching the book without cramming 'facts’ down his readers throats. This book would seem to be part of a new wave of mysteries and if you enjoyed ‘Cracking The Da Vinci Code' then you will enjoy this story. Recommended. Paul Hanley
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OTHER REVIEWS - July 2004
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‘The
Portrait Of Mrs Charbuque’ is set in late nineteenth-century New
York and is told in the first person by the main protagonist, Piambo,
an artist.
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