GONDOLA SCAM

Lovejoy #8

by Jonathan Gash

Antiques expert Lovejoy is up against a powerful criminal, scheming to steal some priceless Venetian art, as well as the encroaching sea under which Venice and its treasures are sinking

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Audiobook, Mystery Thriller, British Literature, Crime, Novels

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

John Grant is an English crime writer, who writes under the pen name Jonathan Gash. He is the author of the Lovejoy series of novels. He wrote the novel The Incomer under the pen name Graham Gaunt.

Grant is a doctor by training and worked as a general practitioner and pathologist. He served in the British Army and attained the rank of Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was head of bacteriology at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the University of London between 1971 and 1988.

Grant won the John Creasey Award in 1977 for his first Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair. He is also the author of a series of medical thrillers featuring the character Dr. Clare Burtonall.

Grant lives outside Colchester in Essex, the setting for many of his novels. He has also been published in Postscripts.

Reviews

[Jeff Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Gash's rogue antique Lovejoy finds himself up to his neck in Venice where he is working as a faker for a wealthy business who thinks he is saving culture. As usual things are never what they seem as Lovejoy finds out what the real scam and what he could make from it. A very clever book as the author takes the reader on a journey from the main canals to it's more seedy back waters. A great read if you are a fan of the books or television series.

[Toni Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me a surprising amount of time to finish this tiny book, but I picjed it up again the other day and read the last 100 pages or so and i'm so glad I did!! I really enjoyed this story. It was full of art and antiques and lust. But mostly I kust really really enjoyed Lovejoy. He is unlike any character i've read. He is so modest but also so vocky. So sassy and slick yet so anxious and cowardly. I've never read from the point of view of someone with those charavteristics. He's talented and clever and I love spy novels which this definitely has this amateur spy feeling to it? I really enjoyed it!

[Jerstyn Morehay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovejoy becomes embroiled in a baffling scheme between three poisonous generations of an English aristocratic family to steal the entire double millennia cultural and artistic output of the sinking city of Venice; and yes, you read all that correctly. Ingenious entry from the already ingenious Jonathan Gash pseudonymously-penned antiques thriller series -- and yes, you also read those last three words correctly -- is as always as historically, culturally, and artistically educational as it is violent, politically incorrect, and fun. In short, and as usual, lives up to both words making up its compound-named, antiquarian antihero.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovejoy is a divvie, which he defines as one with a natural instinct for knowing whether an antique is authentic or a copy; Venice throws him for a loop with ancient treasures on all sides.
Google however defines it as UK slang for a stupid person.
Amoral yes, exasperating in his blaming everyone for his own faults, yet he has an appreciation for art and the many women he delights in and deceives.
No doubt much fun for the physician author to think up clever things for this reprobate to do.

[KathyNV · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovejoy is a fascinating character. He’s part antique dealer, master manipulator and forger with a dash of ethics. A stolen fake, two murders and the mysterious Mr. Pinder lead him into a clandestine antique scam in Venice. Women, food and a very dysfunctional family take him on the journey of a life time! It was a fun ride. I loved the characters, plot and the rich background of one of my favorite cities, Venice Italy. I highly recommend “The Gondola Scam”! It was a fun read!

[Boweavil · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've had it with Lovejoy. Just too much the antihero. This one is complicated and if you haven't been to Venice, it will be incomprehensible. I did spend a week there 20 years ago, so I had some sense of what is going on, but did not enjoy Lovejoy's self-pity. Ugh.

[Lila · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very complex series of double crossing takes Lovejoy to Venice. It seems he does speak Italian.

[jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovejoy attends a secret professionals-only antiques auction and is mystified and offended that his client would be taken in by the fake painting being offered, and worse, bids high enough to win it. When the client is murdered so soon after the auction, it's clear that someone didn't want him to have the fake. Lovejoy is pulled into a family business that sends him to Venice looking for the source of the fake artwork.

This was my first Lovejoy novel, though I've seen a few episodes of the t.v. series. There are good points here- Lovejoy is self-deprecating but full of insider information about antiques and how to make forgeries (something he dabbles in himself) and he makes some pointed observations about human behavior. He's also incredibly mysaginistic and has zero morals. What didn't work for me was the whole grand plan towards the end, as it was too difficult to follow all those minute movements the author was describing. Not a bad story and I have another Lovejoy on the shelf to try.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2132126.html[return][return]This is a reasonably good illustration of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Lovejoy books. On the plus side, Gash actually uses both Lovejoy's home setting in East Anglia, for the first quarter of the book, and then a richly imagined Venice where he becomes part of an industrial scale forgery operation, the details of the manufacturing fake antiques outlined in all their loving complexity. On the downside, women continue to throw themselves at Lovejoy for no apparent reason, he continues to treat them abominably, and the actual forgery plan is baroque to far beyond any point of plausibility, and the supposedly comic ending is almost identical to that of The Vatican Rip, published three years earlier. I think those who don't know the Lovejoy novels could take this as a fair sample of what they are like.

[Thomas Hale · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this book because of the blurb: 'Can one person - even Lovejoy, the quintessential rogue - steal all the antiques in Venice?' And by the time I was halfway through I realised I didn't care whether or not he could. Lovejoy is a weasely, sexist twerp, and the other characters are even less well-drawn, especially the women (even for 1986!). Two good things this book does: I learned a fair bit about art forgery, and about the architecture of Venice. In fact, Gash probably went on a nice holiday to Venice and thought he could use his travel diary as the basis for another book - it seems this is actually the sixth Lovejoy "mystery", so maybe he was just out of ideas at this point. It didn't make me want to go back and read any more, though. I preferred this book when it was just a silly title and a great tagline.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to this book, and enjoyed it, in spite of the very far-fetched plot, involving art forgery in Venice.

I liked the very English flavor of the thing (men are "blokes," ladies are "birds," the protagonist "scarpers," usw, and the narrator (yes, I listened to this) does plausible versions of various class accents. I also liked the detail, accurate or not (who knows?) about the craft of art and antique forgery. The local Venetian color is interesting. I learned I lot I didn't know, about places like Torcello, a now mostly-deserted island that was quite prominent in its medieval heyday.

The main character, Lovejoy, is a randy sod who has dicey morals and gets into scrapes, his main passion being antiques and art. Something of an anti-hero, but not full-on picaresque. We are supposed to like him.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay this book started off really good, found myself laughing out loud, in public, I always like that. But somehow it went downhill for me, and stayed there. I think part of it is my atrophied mind, he would describe things and I would get totally lost in the description, couldn't visualize it. I wouldn't be surprised if others have no problem with his descriptions, but I was lost. The story about someone trying to replace all the antiques in Venice with fakes, in order to save the originals from going in the sea with Venice, was an interesting concept. I've never read a Lovejoy Mystery before (another book from the book exchange) and would probably try another if one showed up, but wouldn't hunt one down!

[Ellen Oberkotter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tale set in Venice, an interesting and educational foray into the world of art and forgery. Lovejoy, our protagonist in these books, is the type of person whom I would avoid like the plague, were I to meet him in real life. But in a story I find him delightfully fun to read about. That's typical of literature - "Dr. Zhivago" is a tale of adulteries, war, suicide, betrayal and death, but most people call it a romantic drama. (If that's romance, count me out.) The rambling, conversational style of Gash's writing makes an appealing character out of Lovejoy, and I wind up rooting for the scoundrel.

[WhatShouldIRead]

I'm afraid these books have become too formulaic and predictable for me to enjoy. This story is similar to the previous 2 I've read only taking place in a different setting.

The mystery hardly got started till well past the halfway mark - all Lovejoy seemed to do in the beginning is scrape together odd jobs for money.

I think I'll give this series a break for now and hopefully when I pick up this author again, I will enjoy it better.

[Desiree · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovejoy is a lovable rogue who blunders his way through the art and forgery business.
Of course, the books are a bit cliche, but the protagonist of the books makes me laugh and the descriptions of the cities where the stories take place (in this case Venice) are evocative.
An amusing book without too many pretensions, a good beach read.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I generally enjoy this series I found this book to be a bit tedious. Trying to get a little too fancy with location (Venice) and spending exhobitant amounts of time describing details that really don't need that much.

[Lee Riggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun mystery, with a good feel for Venice and its geographies and non-tourist side. An entertaining protagonist, although rather dated for its very un P.C. depiction of women and minorities. It comes across as late 60s instead of early 80s.

[Jeff Stanger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gash seemed to be reenergized with the character of Lovejoy in this outing. Most of the action takes place in Venice, so maybe the contrast from East Anglia is what gave this Lovejoy mystery a little more punch.

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cool setting and you learn a bit of history, but Lovejoy isn't much of a hero and the story is the typical Lovejoy adventure.
Dreary and only mildly entertaining.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovejoy's assignment--to steal the artifacts of Venice before the water claims them forever...of course, nothing is simple when Lovejoy is involved.

[Ruth Kevghas · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took a little to get with the language but when I did it was fun!

[Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was mostly fine even though Lovejoy talks too much. The ending was very disappointing from both a reader and writer's perspective.