A page-turning tale of art and obsession
Not content to jump back on the vampire bandwagon, even after her success with the Dracula-centric The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova moves into the dreamy world of the fine arts with her newest work, The Swan Thieves. Shifting between 1879 France and present-day Washington D.C., Thieves presents us with the enigmatic Robert Oliver — a fantastically skilled artist — who loses what appears to have been an already precarious grip on reality when he nearly attacks a painting in D.C.'s National Gallery of Art. He is subsequently arrested and put under the psychiatric care of Dr. Andrew Marlow (who himself happens to be an amateur painter), and goes mute for 11 months after announcing that he, "did it for her."
< br> Marlow's investigation into the roots of Oliver's obsession (just who is "she," and why would Oliver go to such lengths to destroy one particular painting?) ends up paralleling Marlow's own fixation on his patient's psyche. Visiting Oliver's various women — including many exes — he discovers that his patient was hung up on the letters of a French Impressionist, which in turn brings Marlow to various far-flung, exotic and glamorous locations. Let professional detachment be damned, Kostova seems to say, and allow art to triumph.

In reality, it is Kostova's ability to turn a phrase that keeps one listening to the dulcet tones of Treat Williams and Anne Heche. She writes her scenes as though she were painting them, which means the listener will be treated to hours of, "the evergreens full of crows and cobwebs," and "spots of color that must have been summer flowers."