Trick of the Eye - Softcover

Hitchcock, Jane Stanton

3.41

663 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451176731 ISBN 13: 9780451176738

Publisher: Penguin, 1993

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Faith Crowell is 39 years old, content in an artist's life that is solitary but not lonely. A specialist in trompe l'oeil - the art of painterly illusion that makes things seem to be what they are not - she is about to learn that illusion is more than a painter's trick: for some it is a way of life. Frances Griffin is a grande dame, a reclusive widow whose fabulous fortune represents the accumulated wealth of generations of American aristocrats. She is one of the country's foremost art collectors, but the commission she is about to offer demands far more than artistic technique. In fact, it will test Faith's very soul. For when Mrs. Griffin proposes that Faith paint the ballroom of her mansion, a room built many years before for her daughter's debutante ball, it is not Faith's talent that she desires, but something else. Jane Stanton Hitchcock has written a stunning novel with modern Gothic overtones set in the fashionable world where privilege and social grace mask a legacy of greed, deception, and murder. Behind the facade of exquisite beauty, behind the kindness with which she is treated, lies a landscape littered with horror and guilt. As the story rushes to a searing climax, Faith will face a shattering clash between her patron's spurious values - and her own hard-won vision of the truth.

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Review:

"An elegant psychological thriller . . ."
-- "People"

"A sleek and villainous tale."--Dominick Dunne

"Hitchock's mysteries are savvy social satires and well-constructed clocks, ticking down to nail-biting climaxes."--New York Post

Hitchock s mysteries are savvy social satires and well-constructed clocks, ticking down to nail-biting climaxes. --New York Post"

Simultaneously luscious and ladylike. Pure pleasure for psychological-suspense fans. --"Kirkus Reviews""

A tautly controlled narrative voice and a prose style that transcends genre key the action in this gothic thriller about a successful trompe l oeil artist commissioned to work at a grand old estate on the North Shore of Long Island. --"Publishers Weekly""

A sleek and villainous tale. --Dominick Dunne"

"Simultaneously luscious and ladylike. Pure pleasure for psychological-suspense fans."--Kirkus Reviews

"A tautly controlled narrative voice and a prose style that transcends genre key the action in this gothic thriller about a successful trompe l'oeil artist commissioned to work at a grand old estate on the North Shore of Long Island."--Publishers Weekly

From the Back Cover:

For artist Faith Cromwell, it is the commission of a lifetime: painting the famed ballroom of an opulent Long Island estate. But her new patron has a macabre fixation on the daughter who was brutally murdered in the house a decade earlier--one so intense that it jeopardizes Faith's own sense of mind. And as she pieces together the details of the grisly crime scene that shadows the house, Faith slowly discovers that she herself plays the starring role in a bizarre and dangerous charade.

Sophisticated and chilling, Trick of the Eye explores a world where evil tarnishes privilege, and nothing is what it appears to be.

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