The Icon

When Matthew Spear, a young curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, meets the lovely Ana Kessler, an art dealer who has inherited an impressive group of pieces, he discovers a prize: the collection includes the Holy Mother of Katarini, a sacred icon long thought destroyed. But while Matthew recognizes the Icon's value as a work of art, he also discovers that it may carry a far greater significance.

Soon Matthew discovers that he has a strange and more personal connection to the Icon, one that thrusts him into a Byzantine web of death and deception. All involved believe the Icon to be a source of fantastic and inexplicable power, and all were somehow connected to the events that transpired during World War II. As he experiences the peculiar resonance of the Icon, Matthew begins to see that the only way out of his entanglement is to discover what really happened in the past. Before he walks into the harrowing situation that will decide who lives and who dies, Matthew will be forced to re-examine virtually every aspect of his life: the loyalties within his family, his feelings for Ana, and even the question of his own faith.

In a stunning debut that spans more than half a century and two continents, The Icon asks us to reach into the very heart of all our questions about faith, power, and love.

©2005 Neil Olson (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A] gripping, intelligent first novel of art thievery, treachery, and revenge." (Publishers Weekly)

could have been entertaining

but the plot and the characters were a bit confusing. might have enjoyed it otherwise.