Blog Tour: Restrike by Reba White Williams

Author: Reba White Williams
Publisher: Delos
Date of publication: June 2013


Cousins Coleman and Dinah Greene moved from North Carolina to New York after college to make their mark on the art world: Coleman is the editor of an influential arts magazine and Dinah is the owner of a print gallery in Greenwich Village.

When billionaire Heyward Bain arrives with a glamorous assistant, announcing plans to fund a fine print museum, Coleman is intrigued and plans to get to know Bain and publish an article about him. Dinah hopes to sell him enough prints to save her gallery. At the same time, swindlers, attracted by Bain’s lavish spending, invade the print world to grab some of his money.

When a print dealer dies in peculiar circumstances, Coleman is suspicious, but she can’t persuade the NYPD crime investigator of a connection between the dealer’s death and Bain’s buying spree. After one of Coleman’s editors is killed and Coleman is attacked, the police must acknowledge the connection, and Coleman becomes even more determined to discover the truth about Bain. In an unforgettable final scene, Coleman risks her life to expose the last deception threatening her, her friends, and the formerly tranquil print world.

Restrike is a pretty good mystery.    For the most part, I liked the overall story.  There is a lot packed into this book, so it takes a bit of sorting through to figure out what is going on initially. I kind of felt  like there were too many characters to keep track of at times.  Despite that, the mystery was well planned out with twists that will surprise you.  One of them, I wasn't expecting at all.  I know nothing, really, about the art world or about prints, but that didn't really make a difference to the story.  I felt like the author gave me enough information to be comfortable with the topic.

Dinah and Coleman are great characters.  I was happy when Dinah finally got a backbone and stood up to her husband.  I also like Coleman.  She is a likable character who values her family and friends.  I also liked her side-kick, Dolly. They are definitely characters I would like to see in future books.  It looks like this is the start to a series, so I look forward to the further adventures of Coleman and Dinah.

About the author:

I planned to make my living writing novels. But in New York, economic reality caught up with me, and I wrote about art, and business and finance, because that’s what I could get into print, and what paid the rent.

Along the way, I earned my MBA at Harvard, my MA in Art History at Hunter, my PhD in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and my MA in Fiction Writing at Antioch University.

I’ve written articles for numerous art and financial magazines, including Art & Auction, Print Quarterly, and Institutional Investor. I’ve served on the Print Committees of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum. I’ve been a member of the Editorial Board of Print Quarterly, and I am an Honorary Keeper of American Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University. I’ve served as President of the New York City Art Commission, and Vice Chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts.

Fine-art print collecting, in collaboration with my husband, has been a major activity, and prompted me to return to school for a PhD in Art History. We used our collection, thought to be the largest of its type—prints by American artists—to create traveling exhibitions. We circulated seventeen separate exhibits to over one hundred museums worldwide, and I did most of the research and wrote the exhibition catalogues. In December 2008, most of our collection—about 5000 prints—was donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, but we are still recognized as experts in the field.