Six Degrees of Separation – From Still Life to Bellewether

This is the first Saturday of the month which means that it is time for Six Degrees of Separation, the book challenge, hosted by Kate at Kate from Books are My Favourite and Best

The starting point for us this round is to begin with a book we have previously finished a chain with. Since I have only been participating for a few months, I have fewer choices. I decided to return to my first entry, on July 4^th – Louise Penny’s Still Life. She is a favourite author, as well as being Canadian,  and this was the first book in her mystery series, starring Inspector Gamache.

 

1. This led to another novel with the same title – Still Life by Val McDermid. It too is a mystery, has an investigation involving art forgery and murder.

“In Still Life, McDermid returns to her propulsive series featuring DCI Karen Pirie, who finds herself investigating the shadowy world of forgery, where things are never what they seem.”

 

2. Art forgery led to In the Full Light of the Sun by Clare Clark, a novel, based on a true story involving forged Van Gogh’s.

“Based on a true story, this new novel follows the fortunes of three Berliners caught up in an art scandal—involving newly discovered van Goghs—that rocks Germany amidst the Nazis’ rise to power.”

 

3. The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick, also involves a forgery, but is a non-fiction book – the true story of Vermeer, Nazis and a hoax.

“As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger’s Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man’s mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.”

 

4. This focus on Vermeer, led me to Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, a novel that imagines the life of the young subject of Vermeer’s famous painting.

“With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer’s extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries—and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier’s second novel of the same title.”

 

5. This book led to The Virgin Blue, another historical novel by Tracy Chevalier, about two women who are linked through a common thread, 400 years apart.

 “Meet Ella Turner and Isabelle du Moulin—two women born centuries apart, yet bound by a fateful family legacy…. A peculiar dream of the color blue propels (Ella) on a quest to uncover her family’s French ancestry. As the novel unfolds—alternating between Ella’s story and that of Isabelle du Moulin four hundred years earlier—a common thread emerges that unexpectedly links the two women. Part detective story, part historical fiction, The Virgin Blue is a novel of passion and intrigue that compels readers to the very last page.”

 

6. The dual timeline led me to Bellewether by Susanna Kearsley, an intriguing novel – both historical fiction and detective story, again with two women who are connected through time.

“Some houses seem to want to hold their secrets.   
It’s 1759 and the world is at war, pulling the North American colonies of Britain and France into the conflict.
When captured French officers are brought to Long Island to be billeted in private homes on their parole of honour, it upends the lives of the Wilde family—deeply involved in the treasonous trade and already divided by war.
(Lydia Wilde, and French-Canadian lieutenant Jean-Philippe de Sabran)-
Their doomed romance becomes a local legend, told and re-told through the years until the present day, when conflict of a different kind brings Charley Van Hoek to Long Island to be the new curator of the Wilde House Museum.”

And so, from Still Life by Louise Penny, a mystery by a Canadian author, I have wound my way through 6 books to end with Bellewether, another mystery by a Canadian author.

 

Next month (December 5, 2020), we’ll begin with a book that is celebrating its 50th birthday this year – Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume.