Restoration

Description

"Mysterious Levete Asmore was a legend in New Orleans even before he apparently threw himself off the Huey P. Long Bridge in 1941 at the height of his creative powers. Widely regarded as the finest and most original painter ever produced by the American South, Asmore won fame for a series of portraits depicting beautiful young women with whom he was rumored to be sexually involved. And while a certain promiscuity was long tolerated in the old, benighted city, there was no hiding Asmore's secret past in the dark heart of Depression-era Louisiana. When a newspaper reported that the WPA mural he was painting laid waste to sexual taboos and the prevailing racial order, Asmore was ordered to whitewash the masterpiece before the public was allowed to see it. Weeks after doing so, he was dead.". "New Orleans, present day. A young journalist named Jack Charbonnet and the woman he desperately wants, painting restorer Rhys Goudeau, discover that Asmore might not have destroyed his infamous mural after all. If they can find the painting and restore its damaged surface, it promises to answer the riddle of Asmore's violent death and reveal the reasons for his tortured life. The mural also will be worth millions - more than any other art object ever created by an artist from the region. But to save the painting Goudeau and Charbonnet must outmaneuver their rapaciously greedy rivals in the small but wealthy world of Southern art collectors."--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

The buses have not yet begun to arrive: the garden club ladies in sandals and straw hats, the schoolchildren on field trips, the pale, weary northerners grousing about the heat.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Restoration: a novelDoubleday2003-01-01
• RestorationAnchor2004-04-13