The Swan Thieves

Elizabeth Kostova

Its successor, The Swan Thieves, also has a mystery at its core involving the art world, but it is far from a fast-paced thriller, and there are no corpses. Instead, the leisurely pace of the narrative is a large part of its charm.

The main narrator is Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist in his early 50s who lives a carefully ordered life, attending to his patients, keeping himself in shape and spending his spare time painting, a hobby that he loves. When the renowned artist Robert Oliver attacks a painting in Washington DC’s National Gallery, Leda by Gilbert Thomas, a colleague refers him to Marlow, assuming that one artist will understand another.