Harr is a wonderful writer and does his best to create a mystery story around the search for and ultimate discovery of a Caravaggio painting that’s been lost for a couple of hundred years. It’s a fascinating insiders view of art historians and art conservators. Harr does a good job of locating and expressing the eccentricities of a couple of main characters, building a modicum of suspense as he goes. In the end, however, you know the painting will be found and that dispenses with the mystery, leaving only a story about a brilliant young art history student and an isolated conservator honing in on the same painting. It’s not a long read; it’s certainly worth a couple of afternoons. December 2005.