Priceless

Priceless ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Mark Deakins
9:31

In his compelling memoir, Robert K. Wittman shares stories behind his recoveries of priceless art and antiquities: The golden armor of an ancient Peruvian warrior king, the Rodin sculpture that inspired the Impressionist movement,  the headdress Geronimo wore at his final pow-wow and a rare Civil War battle flag carried into battle by one of the nation’s first African-American regiments.  Rising from humble roots as the son of an antique dealer, Wittman built a 20-year career that was nothing short of extraordinary. He went undercover, usually unarmed, to catch art thieves, scammers, and black market traders in Paris and Philadelphia, Rio and Santa Fe, Miami and Madrid.

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Juliet

Juliet ♥ ♥ ♥
Cassandra Campbell
16 discs

Twenty-five-year-old Julie Jacobs is heartbroken over the death of her beloved Aunt Rose. But the shock goes even deeper when she learns that the woman who has been like a mother to her has left her entire estate to Julie’s twin sister. The only thing Julie receives is a key—one carried by her mother on the day she herself died—to a safety-deposit box in Siena, Italy.  This key sends Julie on a journey that will change her life forever—a journey into the troubled past of her ancestor Giulietta Tolomei.  In 1340, still reeling from the slaughter of her parents, Giulietta was smuggled into Siena, where she met a young man named Romeo. Their ill-fated love turned medieval Siena upside-down and went on to inspire generations of poets and artists, the story reaching its pinnacle in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy.

But six centuries have a way of catching up to the present, and Julie gradually begins to discover that here, in this ancient city, the past and present are hard to tell apart. The deeper she delves into the history of Romeo and Giulietta, and the closer she gets to the treasure they allegedly left behind, the greater the danger surrounding her—superstitions, ancient hostilities, and personal vendettas. As Julie crosses paths with the descendants of the families involved in the unforgettable blood feud, she begins to fear that the notorious curse—“A plague on both your houses!”

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The Eight

The Eight ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Susan Denake
Download 25:49

A dabbler in mathematics and chess, Catherine Velis is also a computer expert for a Big Eight accounting firm. Before heading off to a new assignment in Algeria, Cat has her palm read by a fortune-teller. The woman warns Cat of danger. Then an antiques dealer approaches Cat with a mysterious offer: He has an anonymous client who is trying to collect the pieces of an ancient chess service, purported to be in Algeria. If Cat can bring the pieces back, there will be a generous reward.

In the south of France of 1790, Mireille de Rémy and her cousin Valentine are young novices at the fortress-like Montglane Abbey. With France aflame in revolution, the two girls burn to rebel against constricted convent life – and their means of escape is at hand. Buried deep within the abbey are pieces of the Montglane Chess Service, once owned by Charlemagne. Whoever reassembles the pieces can play a game of unlimited power. But to keep the Game a secret from those who would abuse it, the two young women must scatter the pieces throughout the world.

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The Anatomy of Deception

The Anatomy of Deception ♥ ♥
Read by David Ackroyd
9 discs

Dr. Ephraim Carroll came to Philadelphia to study with a leading professor, the brilliant William Osler, believing that he would gain the power to save countless lives. As America hurtles toward a new century, medicine is changing rapidly, in part due to the legalization of autopsy–a crime only a few years before. But Carroll and his mentor are at odds over what they glimpsed that morning in the hospital’s Dead House. And when a second mysterious death is determined to have been a ruthless murder, Carroll can feel the darkness gathering around him–and he ignites an investigation of his own. Soon he is moving between the realm of elite medicine, Philadelphia high society, and a teeming badlands of criminality and sexual depravity along the city’s fetid waterfront. With a wealthy, seductive woman clouding his vision, the controversial artist Thomas Eakins sowing scandal, and the secrets of the nation’s powerful surgeons unraveling around him, Carroll is forced to confront an agonizing moral choice–between exposing a killer, undoing a wrong, and, quite possibly, protecting the future of medicine.

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Provenance

Provenance: How a Con Man & a Forger re-wrote the History of Modern Art ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Marty Peterson
8 hrs 59 mins

In 1986, when struggling painter and single father John Myatt advertised copies of famous paintings, he never imagined he’d become a key player in one of Britain’s biggest art frauds. Myatt soon met John Drewe, who claimed to be a physicist and avid art collector. Soon Drewe, a silver-tongued con man, was passing off Myatt’s work as genuine, including paintings in the style of artists like Giacometti and Ben Nicholson. When buyers expressed concern about the works’ provenance, Drewe began the painstaking process of falsifying records of ownership. Posing as a benefactor, Drewe even planted false documents in the archives of London’s Tate Gallery, but suspicious historians and archivists eventually assisted Scotland Yard in bringing him to justice.  -Publisher’s Weekly

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Pictures at an Exhibition

Pictures at an Exhibition ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Mark Bramhall
7 discs

Born to an art dealer and his pianist wife, Max Berenzon is forbidden from entering the family’s business for reasons he cannot understand. He reluctantly attends medical school, reserving his true passion for his father’s beautiful gallery assistant, Rose. When Paris falls to the Nazis, the Berenzons survive in hiding, returning in 1944 to find that their priceless art collection has vanished. In Max’s obsessive hunt to recover his father’s paintings, he navigates a torn city of corrupt art dealers, black marketers, Râesistants, and collaborators, uncovering not only paintings but the stories of Rose’s heroism, and the truth behind a devastating family secret.

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Parrot and Olivier in America

Parrot and Olivier in American  ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Humphrey Bower
Download (17hrs 35mins)

Olivier is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected in the United States by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.

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The Birth of Venus

The Birth of Venus ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Kathe Mazur
11 discs

In the declining years of the rule of the Medici over Renaissance Florence, an atmosphere of enlightenment and sophistication prevailed; gorgeous art, relaxed mores, and intellectual freedom were the order of the day. But the puritan ideologue Savonarola began to exert ever more control over the city, and was turning it, bit by bit, into a totalitarian theocratic city-state, burning art and banning books with abandon. It is in this atmosphere that Alessandra, an unusually educated woman, must make the choices of her life: a marriage of convenience to her brother’s homosexual lover and a dangerous fascination with the intense, mystical painter who comes to decorate her parents’ chapel. As the world becomes increasingly unsafe for her, she must choose her own path and retain her own individuality.

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The Lost Painting

The Lost Painting ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Campbell Scott
6 discs

In an Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, Francesca Cappelletti, a young graduate student from Rome, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries. The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power.

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The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Sarah Zimmerman, Treat Williams, Anne Heche, John Lee and Erin Corttrell
17 discs

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.

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