DIRTY DEALINGS
ART & ANTIQUES INTEREST TALES
Dirty Dealings provides not only lighthearted stories but also insightful snippets and specific advice for anyone with even a passing interest in the trade. Alot of the tales within tell of some of the strange things I’ve come across in distant places, such as when I couldn’t resist bidding for a mysterious seven-foot-tall masterpiece of taxidermy on the other side of the world, or when, during and electric storm closer to home, an eccentric country dealer insisted on sharing the secret of why one should always look deeply into a dead cow’s eyes.
However, I talk little of billionaires, murder, sex, love and vengeance in these pages, though I admit deceit, fraud and lies are commonplace—just like everywhere else. But, sorry, that’s another story, and this is no place to talk about politics.
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DEATH STENCH ORIGINS
SPECULATIVE, SCI-FI & FANTASY INTEREST STORIES
These two stories relate to prequel events to the novel Death Stench (see below) in which Charlie Close, a young English man on the cusp of university, finds that further study into his disturbing ability to sense impending death in others brings him into contact with the military. Especially an American military officer, Captain Mike Koppner, with whom he bonds.
Both of the events in these prequel stories occur years earlier in their respective lives. In Santa’s Revenge, Charlie is barely in his teens, whereas The Valentine Revenge story develops shortly after Koppner’s enlistment. Yet both stories foreshadow each character’s emerging peculiarities, neither of whom were aware of these implications at the time.
ART & ANTIQUE MYSTERY THRILLERS
The Picasso Provenance
Sarah Hastings is pretty, self-assured and nobody’s fool. But when she flies into New York to surprise her artist father on his birthday, surprise turns into shock as she confronts a horror that sends her spiraling helplessly into a vortex of murder, vengeance and lies.
Desperate, she turns to family friend Adam Kennedy, an art dealer on the brink of a multi-million-dollar sale of Picasso paintings.
Adam cannot resist aiding her, but grows more concerned on finding Sarah’s ordeal has implications far beyond her distressing encounter . . . even going so far as murder.
The Gutenberg Legacy
Fifty years ago, the Murray family lose possession of the most valuable book in the world: the 15th century Gutenberg Bible.
The rival Stone family, its new custodian, assert a dubious right to it and intend to keep it.
Fifty years later, grandson Johnny Murray discovers where his legacy now lies. Inspired by vengeance and the prospect of a multi-million pound payday, he arranges to take it back.
But Lewis Stone is no pushover.
That’s when the Murray family’s tribulations really begin as the dispute escalates from malice to murder.
The Ice House
At times, the energy of evil clings to places and things long after the evil-doers have passed on. Yet the invisible, virulent ripples may continue to radiate interminably.
This is one of those times. Even after sixty-plus years.
In 2005, deep in remote, rural France, a local antiques dealer stumbles upon, and purchases, an iconic WW2 relic with a secret, haunted past.
Before long, a Pandora’s Box of vengeance, greed, and killings spill over into a widespread, frenzied hunt for hidden Nazi looted art amid rising political fanaticism ricocheting around Europe.
SPECULATIVE FICTION: SCI-FI & FANTASY
Death Stench
Charlie Close has guarded a secret ability for years: he can smell every material thing. From cancer to cutlery; from water to weaponry . . . if it has substance, Charlie can smell it. He has no choice.
But now his ability is growing stronger, becoming a curse. Now he can smell impending death from others . . . and he needs it to stop.
After he smells it streaming from a friend’s mother just days before she dies in a car crash, his blood runs cold. In desperation, Charlie seeks medical help . . . but now his secret is out.
DEATH STENCH is a compelling, contemporary, speculative thriller that will intrigue and appeal to anyone interested in the supposed military research into developing the ultimate stealth weapon . . . a psychic warrior who can deal death at a distance.
What Reviewers Have Been Saying About THE PICASSO PROVENANCE
A WOW of a debut crime novel watch this author
. . . Crime and romantic plots interweave and all mysteries are resolved in a resounding end. A perfect crime novel. (Amazon.co.uk)
What is real, what is fake in art and life?
. . . takes straight you to the heart of the New York art market and some of its shady corners. (Amazon.com)
A page turner – excellent crime/mystery choice.
. . . just the right amount of steamy sex and gore. (Amazon.com)
More Murders than an Episode of Midsomer
An interesting debut from an author with a practical working knowledge in the global art market. (Amazon.co.uk)
BACKGROUND
Dann Farrell was born, grew up and attended university in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
He has been a gym instructor, taxi driver, school teacher and health club proprietor before spending welll over twenty years trading antiques and fine art across the world.
Though he started writing while still at university, completing an egregiously embarrassing play titled I pulled up an immovable stool, before deciding he had been wildly presumptuous to imagine that, being such a callow youth, he had any right to write about anything.
Twenty years later, he began to scribble when he could. But business was demanding. Everyone, from the newly wed to the nearly dead, was clamoring for antiques, and sourcing a wide range of old decorative items and furniture was time-consuming. So, it was only toward the end of the twentieth century he buckled down to crafting what became his first novel: The Picasso Provenance.
Since then he has written a speculative thriller, Death Stench, that has been described as The Men Who Stare At Goats meets Stephen King’s Carrie.
His next novel, The Gutenberg Legacy, is again set in the darker side of the Art & Antiques arena. He has recently completed the third in this series, The Ice House, which is another standalone thriller based in the antiques trade, yet inspired both by present-day events in the art mileu as well as genuine events which occurred within the past twenty years around the discreet discovery of a World War Two relic in France.
Currently, he is finalizing Project Death, the sequel to Death Stench, which is due to be published soon.
Dann lives in the countryside just outside Belfast.
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Art Sales Of The Century: Christie’s & Sotheby’s NYC 1999.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s NYC: Art Sales of the 20th Century . . . They certainly were for me, triggering as they did, the core idea of my first novel, The Picasso Provenance. Yes, and this scary fact reminds me just how long it took me to get my act together: another...