Domina

July 3, 2017
Much of the thrill is gone for fierce femme fatale Judith Rashleigh, as well as readers, in bestseller Hilton’s disappointing sequel to 2016’s Maestra. Judith has triumphantly morphed from a London art auction house lackey to glamorous Venice gallery owner Elisabeth Teerlinc—with several dead bodies along the way—and is poised to savor the fruits of her felonious behavior. But a series of mysterious break-ins escalating to the murder of her Russian teacher, Masha, the closest thing to a friend she has, convinces the seductive schemer that she’s far from home free, and it may take every shred of cunning she possesses to survive. Puzzling out who might be gunning for her plunges Judith into a high-stakes art-for-arms scam apparently involving ruthless Russian oligarch Pavel Yermolov, Serbian war criminal Dejan Raznatovic, and a (probably) fake Caravaggio. Though Hilton hasn’t lost her gift for climactic set-pieces, particularly the blood-soaked pair that bookend the novel, too much of the extended cat-and-mouse maneuvering in between remains overly convoluted and less than satisfying. Agent: Toby Mundy, TMA Creative Management (U.K.).

July 1, 2017
A woman with a murderous past reinvents herself as an art dealer in Venice only to have everything she thought she left behind come roaring back.Judith Rashleigh shed her identity, along with a stack of corpses, at the end of Maestra, (2016), vowing to start clean as Elisabeth Teerlinc, an innocuous gallerist new to Venice with a bland Swiss past. Except Rashleigh's appetites can't be quenched by low-level art. Then there are her sexual desires: the sex here--and there's a lot--is more tedious than erotic, more cringeworthy than titillating. Rashleigh, as Elisabeth, is approached by Russian billionaire Pavel Yermolov to value his extensive art collection, which includes pieces only rumored to exist. She politely declines, telling Yermolov she's not qualified for the task. It's never a good idea to say no to a powerful Russian, and soon she's being blackmailed into producing a drawing she's positive doesn't actually exist. The extended metaphor--the mysterious Caravaggio is a stand-in for Elisabeth herself, who also doesn't truly exist--is weak at best. Soon she's off on a multicity European tour, from Venice to Paris to Belgrade, making sure to have narrative-halting sex everywhere she goes for no other reason than to prove she can. (She can. It grows tiring fast.) Since this is the second installment in a planned trilogy, the ending is the expected cliffhanger, but the reader feels so little for the character that the promise of a conclusion in the third book is of little consolation. This is a series of vignettes, not a novel, poorly strung together by a litany of fine clothing and even finer art and punctuated by uncomfortably sticky sexual encounters.

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Starred review from July 1, 2017
The sequel to Hilton's masterful Maestra (2016) finds Judith Rashleigh living under an assumed identity in Venice, where she operates an art gallery. When strange things begin happening (objects in her home seem to move from place to place when she's not there, for example), Judith is forced to confront a terrifying truth: someone knows who she really is and what she has donethe lies, the murders. She has only one chance to save her new life: find a lost painting, one that most experts agree never actually existed, and turn the tables on her blackmailer. The second part of a projected trilogy, the novel ends on a seriously dark note, and, in fact, the book is overall considerably darker than Maestra. It's also even more impossible to put down, more twisted. The concluding installment in the trilogy can't come soon enough for fans of psychological thrillers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2017

Wily woman of the world Judith Rashleigh, who revealed a talent for reinvention in last year's megahit debut Maestra, has become Elisabeth Teerlinc, art gallery owner amid Venice's shimmering canals. But a dead body in Ibiza sends her all over Europe in a quest not to get killed herself.

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