R. A. Scotti (1945–2010)

I'd never heard of this early 1900's theft of Mona Lisa from the Louvre, so looked forward to the details of the investigation and some of the facts around the heist. I was doomed to disappointment, surprised that the story was so highly speculative, providing next to no factual basis for the author's conjecture about the theft.
I never did grasp the point of Scotti's story because it read like a poorly-plotted novel with gushy comments about the allure of the lady in the painting, irrelevant side stories involving other artists, unverified con men (Valiferno) and irrelevant general French history. These distracting insertions into the brief factual aspects of the theft digressed from the theme and hardly contributes to what could have been an interesting piece of art-theft history.… (more)