Woman On Fire, Barr - B+

                 The title is the name of a painting that is very important to two people. The first is Ellis Baum, the dying son of the woman who was the model for the artist. As a boy in Berlin, he saw Nazis take away the picture and take away his mother. The painter was considered degenerate, and he too was consigned to the ashes. The second is Margaux de Laurent, whose grandfather was a Parisian art dealer who purchased the painting in a 1938 Swiss auction of paintings confiscated in Germany and sold to raise capital. Her grandfather lost it to the Nazis when they occupied France. Its appearance in the apartment of the son of the Nazi collector has set both Ellis and Margaux trying to locate it. This is a well done thriller with some very nice background on the world of high fashion, and the amazingly complex world of stolen art, its recovery and the endless legal/moral issues that the world still faces.