Barry Klemm

Being Jarvis Kreeg Barry Klemm

JARVIS KREEG- BEYOND THE GRAVE! Three years after the death of England's greatest recent painter, new masterpieces by the errant genius are turning up all over the European art market, fetching staggering prices. The trail of investigation leads to Australia and a strange house on a remote beach, where the police find the artist has slipped through their fingers but left behind more of the brilliant fakes and his very bewildered girlfriend, Lena Carlson. Lena, a fierce young woman who recently 'walked out on her own life and slammed the door in its face', does not take lightly to being left holding the bag. Aided by a British Policeman, Roger Timmins, and the world's greatest authority on Jarvis Kreeg, Quentin Harcourt, Lena sets out to get to the bottom of the mystery. Did Kreeg fake his own death and was her lover, Jack Daniels, in fact the great man himself, or is he a murderer who in some extra-ordinary way took over another man's life and work? It becomes a question of identity-just what are the factors that make a man who and what he is, and how do we perceive them? Resolving the question one way or the other proves to be a more difficult task than logic suggests, and all the more so when Lena begins to realise that she has become involved in a deeper and stranger mystery than any of them suspected. For every time she reckons she's figured it out, new evidence pulls her latest theory out from under her feet. Lena, in fact, is the bait in a trap that grows more complex as the mystery deepens, heading towards a confrontation not only between Lena and the mysterious man she loves-who somehow she just can't stop herself from continually betraying-but also a clash between one man's reality and his imagined self.