Every Picture Tells a Story

This mechanical, melodramatic caper from the author of See Naples and Kill takes artist Michael Phipps, who has just completed a prison term for forgery, from London to Venice. He's bent on finding--and simultaneously keeping from the hands of Italian terrorists-- a church art treasure stolen in 1978. Shortly after Toni Chambon, a shady Italian he meets in a London gallery, asks Phipps to help him locate a crooked British art dealer, Phipps glimpses a photo of the paintingwhen it falls out of Chambon's bag as the latter is mugged in the street. Next, men in Venetian plaster masks accost Phipps in his studio in an attempt to ascertain the whereabouts of the invaluable Madonna del cigno ; when Phipps cannot tell them, the thugs burn his latest paintings. Vowing to find the treasure himself, Phipps travels to Venice where he confronts attackers, discovers two corpses with fingers chopped off, and is captured, in the company of an old flame, by six terrorists in Donald Duck masks. Sneering, self-pitying Phipps is an unappealing sleuth, and the descriptions of Venice are humdrum. (July)