St. Martin’s © 2007, 384 pages [amazon]

Precious (Preshy) Rafferty and her cousin Lily Swan have never met. Both women happen to own antique stores, but they have little else in common. Precious is an American living in Paris, single but surrounded by supportive friends and family. Lily is Shanghainese, and she is wed to her work, driven by her desire for wealth after having grown up in poverty. She supplements her income by trading in stolen antiquities, a risky business that involves handing wads of cash over to hoodlums in the middle of the night. She has few friends, and the person she most relies on, her assistant Mary-Lou Chen, proves to have been poorly chosen. The lives of these three women, Preshy, Lily, and Mary-Lou, are all affected in the course of Elizabeth Adler’s novel by one particular antique–a necklace whose pearl was stolen from the grave of the Dowager Empress of China–and by the charming sociopath, Bennett Yuan, who will do anything to get his hands on it.

[INSET TEXT: She supplements her income by trading in stolen antiquities, a risky business that involves handing wads of cash over to hoodlums in the middle of the night.] Meet Me in Venice may not be the best book you’ll read this year. Adler’s villains are two-dimensional, and she tends to spill her characters’ back story onto the page without awesome subtlety.

“While Lily’s father played the tables,

her mother attempted to make a living selling cheap copies of antiques. Somehow the family scraped by. When she was sixteen her father died and Lily left school and took over the business. Her mother died five years later. Lily was alone in the world with no one to rely on but herself.”

I found references to Preshy’s friend Daria’s “Super Kid” cringe-inducing. And I wonderuddy at Adler’s decision to give her main character the name “Precious”: it is so unusual that one cannot help but be reminded of another literary Precious, Mme Ramotswe of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. (It’s rather like naming a character “Sherlock.” You’re certain to distract readers by calling to mind that other Sherlock.)

I came away from Adler’s novel, however, reminded of how delightful an elude reading can be. Meet Me in Venice is a solid romantic mystery, light on character, perhaps, but with a decent plot. Adler makes you root for her protagonists and boo her bad guys and hope that the right people wind up together in the end. I’m happy I read it.

Tags: books, mystery, romance, Meet Me in Venice, Elizabeth Adler, book reviews