First
time local author, Alec Nevala-Lee, will be at After-Words Books on Thursday
March 29, 2012 from 6:30-8:30 reading from and signing copies of his first book
The Icon Thief (Signet;
978-0-451-23620-3; March 6, 2012 $9.99). Wine reception following.
A controversial masterpiece resurfaces in Budapest. A ballerina's
headless corpse is found beneath the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.
And New York's
Russian mafia is about to collide with the equally ruthless art world.
Maddy
Blume, an ambitious young art buyer for a Manhattan
hedge fund, is desperate to track down a priceless painting by Marcel Duchamp,
the most influential artist of the twentieth century. The discovery of a woman's decapitated body
thrusts criminal investigator Alan Powell into a search for the same painting,
with its enigmatic image of a headless nude.
And a Russian thief and assassin known as the Scythian must steal the
painting to save his reputation--and his life.
The
murderous race is on. And in the lead is an insidious secret society intent on
reclaiming the painting for reasons of its own—and by any means necessary.
Alec
Nevala-Lee was born in 1980 in Castro
Valley, California.
He graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in Classics, and
worked for several years as an associate at a global investment firm based in New York. His first
novel, The Icon Thief, will be
released by Signet in March 2012, to be followed by a sequel, City of Exiles, later this year. He lives with
his wife in Oak Park, Illinois.
