The artist, Robert Carr, always fancied himself in love with Anna. It is a love affair that has proved profitable in his career. Since her disappearence from his life thirteen years before, he has painted Anna in every guise, style and genre and both he and his amanuensis have achieved worldwide fame.
Now, Anna seems to have returned and Robert Carr is not sure he can cope with the real flesh and blood reality of his fantasy woman and Anna seems to have reservations of her own about being dragged into the spotlight.
Then Anna is taken from him again, violently this time, found dead in her flat and Robert is the major suspect.
A tale of obsession and its consequences and the pain that comes when the truth is finally exposed.
Anna lay in the small space between brown sofa and oval coffee table. She lay, face upward, with her head towards him. One leg had crashed down onto the table surface. Her arms were thrown outward as though she had tried to grasp something that might break her fall but Rob's gaze was drawn to that brilliant patch of crimson, garishly bright against her white shirt.
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"Stockbrokers and investment bankers are workaholics; artists are obsessed." So declared a character wielding a paintbrush in a New Yorker cartoon of the mid-1990s, and London artist Robert Carr, the painter in Jane Adams' latest mystery, A KISS GOODBYE, appears a case in point.
Obsessed with work, and hardly able to function away from the easel, Carr is also obsessed with a woman named Anna Freeman. Anna is the subject of most of Carr's work, but she disappeared years ago and nobody knows where she is. That is, until Carr's unscrupulous agent Simon Roper decides that a live television confrontation between artist and muse might be just the thing to boost Carr's already considerable fame. All goes well, but the night after the taping, Carr and his rediscovered make a date, and she ends up dead.
If you think that this story is a cliche, and you know who did it, you're wrong. I thought I did (possibly because James VI had a favourite named Robert Carr who died under house arrest for murder as a result of an arguably obsessive love) but was dead wrong. Adams plays on reader expectations to build up a familiar scenario, then undermines it with a series of remarkably creative twists. And yet, A KISS GOODBYE is not merely a suspense novel. It is definitely a character-based story: every new discovery adds layers to the characters' personas.
Through Carr's experience, Adams also explores issues of process, influence, and identity that concern every writer, including what happens when art meets modern business and media. The dry, stuffy, noirish DI Vic Marris's perspective of Carr, which reaches contempt without quite getting to philistinism, provides a good counterbalance, though Marris never quite comes alive in the way that Carr does. It is telling that Marris isn't mentioned in the dust jacket blurb.
In short, A KISS GOODBYE is beautifully written and deeply suspenseful, but pushes the envelope far beyond those reasons to read it.
