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Killing for Klimt #1
Killing for Klimt, A Megan Crespi Mystery Series Novel
In this first in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, becomes involved in a race to recover the Secretum, a ''shameful, secret panel'' stolen from the artist's studio the night after his death in February of 1918. Her travels, at the behest of New York's Moderne Galerie Museum, owner of the famed 1907 ''golden'' Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, take her from the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Switzerland's Ascona, as well as to New York, Vienna, Helsinki, Paris, Montreal, and Girdwood, Alaska. Megan is shadowed by two different assassins hired by fanatical Günther Winter. Owner of Alaska's Alpenglow Hotel, he keeps his secret art collection in an annex basement. Several killings occur involving the interested criminal parties and naive owners of Klimt artworks. Finally setting up a trade--Winter's Secretum for the golden Adele--Crespi and two colleagues fly to Alaska. They bring with them two one purporting to contain the Adele portrait, and a larger one to receive the Secretum panel. But there, greed leads to unexpected and colossal consequences. Will Megan survive the final killing for Klimt? (Includes Readers Guide)
266 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2014
3 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Alessandra Comini
52 books14 followersShort Biography for Dr. Alessandra Comini
www.alessandracomini.com / / / www.megancrespi.com
Alessandra Comini is University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She received her B. A. degree from Barnard College, her M. A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph. D. "with distinction" from Columbia University where she taught for ten years. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, served as the Alfred Hodder Resident Humanist at Princeton University, and been named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University's European Humanities Research Centre (1996). Voted “outstanding professor” by her students sixteen times and H.O.P.E. honoree four times, she has been extended the Distinguished Teaching Prize of the Meadows School of the Arts (1986) and the United Methodist Church Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award (1996). An undergraduate and a graduate scholarship in her name have been established by former students, one a professor of surgical oncology in Little Rock, Arkansas; the other, co-owner of an international antiques business in Dallas.
The author of many reviews, essays, and articles for national and international publications and a regular contributor to Stagebill (with Internet redistribution), Professor Comini has published eight books, of which one, Egon Schiele’s Portraits (l974, reissued in paperback, l990 and 2014), was nominated for the National Book Award and received the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her other books are: Schiele in Prison (l973), Gustav Klimt (l975, with French, German, and Dutch editions; reissued l986, 1990, 1994, 2001), Egon Schiele (l976, with Italian, French, German, and Dutch editions; reissued l986, 1994, 2001), The Fantastic Art of Vienna (l978), The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (l987; reissued in paperback with a new preface in 2008), and Egon Schiele Nudes (1994). She contributed the chapter on Scandinavian artists to the l990 book World Impressionism, essays for the Washington National Gallery’s l992 catalogue and exhibition of Käthe Kollwitz (German edition, 1993) and 1994 catalogue and traveling exhibition of Egon Schiele. as well as an eponymous essay for the 1994 book on La Traviata, Violetta and Her Sisters and one for the 1996 English National Opera booklet, Salome. A major essay on the visual Wagner appears in the 1997 book The Threat to the Cosmos, two on Mahler in Muziek & Wetenschap, 1996 and in Gustav Mahler et l’ironie, 2001, and one on Beethoven in Beethoven and His World, 2000, as well as one on allegory in Klimt und die Frauen, 2000 (English edition, 2000). The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society commissioned a lecture “Toys in Freud’s Attic” for 2000, published in Between Rousseau and Freud in 2002, and the Santa Fe Opera commissioned special lectures from her for six consecutive years from 1997 through 2002 (and again in 2006), as has the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for the years 2000 through 2006, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for 2007. In the fall of 2007 she lectured on Sibelius and Mahler in London and on Klimt and Mahler at the Neue Galerie in New York. where she also spoke on Schönberg in 2010 and on Expressionism, “The Decisive Decade,” in 2011. In 2014 she spoke at the Dallas Museum of Art’s symposium on the Wittgenstein/Czeschka vitrine.
A featured speaker at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Symposia under conductor Kurt Masur during the 1970s and 1980s, Professor Comini, who is also an amateur flutist, has participated in many congresses and symposia from Helsinki, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Dublin, and Oxford to Montpellier, Hamburg, Graz, Vienna, Budapest, and St. Petersburg in her special field of musical iconography. In recognition of her contributions to Germanic culture she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor in l990 by the Republic of Austria. Her lively
www.alessandracomini.com / / / www.megancrespi.com
Alessandra Comini is University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She received her B. A. degree from Barnard College, her M. A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph. D. "with distinction" from Columbia University where she taught for ten years. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, served as the Alfred Hodder Resident Humanist at Princeton University, and been named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University's European Humanities Research Centre (1996). Voted “outstanding professor” by her students sixteen times and H.O.P.E. honoree four times, she has been extended the Distinguished Teaching Prize of the Meadows School of the Arts (1986) and the United Methodist Church Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award (1996). An undergraduate and a graduate scholarship in her name have been established by former students, one a professor of surgical oncology in Little Rock, Arkansas; the other, co-owner of an international antiques business in Dallas.
The author of many reviews, essays, and articles for national and international publications and a regular contributor to Stagebill (with Internet redistribution), Professor Comini has published eight books, of which one, Egon Schiele’s Portraits (l974, reissued in paperback, l990 and 2014), was nominated for the National Book Award and received the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her other books are: Schiele in Prison (l973), Gustav Klimt (l975, with French, German, and Dutch editions; reissued l986, 1990, 1994, 2001), Egon Schiele (l976, with Italian, French, German, and Dutch editions; reissued l986, 1994, 2001), The Fantastic Art of Vienna (l978), The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (l987; reissued in paperback with a new preface in 2008), and Egon Schiele Nudes (1994). She contributed the chapter on Scandinavian artists to the l990 book World Impressionism, essays for the Washington National Gallery’s l992 catalogue and exhibition of Käthe Kollwitz (German edition, 1993) and 1994 catalogue and traveling exhibition of Egon Schiele. as well as an eponymous essay for the 1994 book on La Traviata, Violetta and Her Sisters and one for the 1996 English National Opera booklet, Salome. A major essay on the visual Wagner appears in the 1997 book The Threat to the Cosmos, two on Mahler in Muziek & Wetenschap, 1996 and in Gustav Mahler et l’ironie, 2001, and one on Beethoven in Beethoven and His World, 2000, as well as one on allegory in Klimt und die Frauen, 2000 (English edition, 2000). The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society commissioned a lecture “Toys in Freud’s Attic” for 2000, published in Between Rousseau and Freud in 2002, and the Santa Fe Opera commissioned special lectures from her for six consecutive years from 1997 through 2002 (and again in 2006), as has the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for the years 2000 through 2006, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for 2007. In the fall of 2007 she lectured on Sibelius and Mahler in London and on Klimt and Mahler at the Neue Galerie in New York. where she also spoke on Schönberg in 2010 and on Expressionism, “The Decisive Decade,” in 2011. In 2014 she spoke at the Dallas Museum of Art’s symposium on the Wittgenstein/Czeschka vitrine.
A featured speaker at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Symposia under conductor Kurt Masur during the 1970s and 1980s, Professor Comini, who is also an amateur flutist, has participated in many congresses and symposia from Helsinki, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Dublin, and Oxford to Montpellier, Hamburg, Graz, Vienna, Budapest, and St. Petersburg in her special field of musical iconography. In recognition of her contributions to Germanic culture she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor in l990 by the Republic of Austria. Her lively
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 17, 2017
Comini certainly writes what she knows - manymany parallels between herself & Crespi. A few plot holes, but I'm not going to spoiler. Very good writing per se.
April 1, 2020
Disappointing. I love the idea behind this, and am impressed with how much art history info is relayed through a mystery novel! Unfortunately, the writing didn’t work for me — it felt heavy and was not easy to read. I ended up scanning a lot of this. I don’t think I will read more by this author, though I wish I had liked this. (Also, the font was atrocious—the whole thing was written in an Art Deco type of font, which was very hard to read.)
July 8, 2019
A fun, easy beach read, especially for lovers of art history. Dr. Comini was one of my professors and there are a lot of similarities between herself and her main character in this art-historical inspired fictitious murder mystery.
May 28, 2019
LIKED THE ART WORLD MYSTERY MIX!!
May 14, 2024
Lots of extraneous material. Pretty simplistic since solution seemed for everyone to either be shot or die.
Subject was interesting
Subject was interesting
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 18, 2016
This was enjoyable. I love a good art history mystery, and it started off promisingly. The author really knows her stuff and it was amusing to see how she weaves fact and fiction together. The characters are very well drawn. At some point in the last quarter or so she seems to get bored with the actual mystery part, and that section seemed rushed and unrewarding. I'll read another in the series. I found the Alix London books to be much more satisfying, however, if you are looking for more in this genre.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews