The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon, Natasha Lehrer, Pierre Le-Tan

 This is a charming, moving book about one woman's persistence and dogged research to seek justice and restitution of her family's collection of artworks. When her cousin Andrew tells her that there is a mystery involving her great-grandfather's sale of his collection, the author starts delving into the story, with some help from her relations. However, her research mainly involves hours of research in museums in her attempts to find out what happened to the paintings, mostly French Impressionist works, which are worth a fortune. She discovers that the artworks were sold to the Nazis, but was it a forced sale? Was her great-grandfather an avaricious opportunist, or was he forced to sell? The case becomes more difficult to unravel as she looks further into it, because of the murky dealings of the Nazis, and their ability to cover their steps at almost every turn.

This book is also an indictment of the difficulty of obtaining restitution of artworks from many museums, which are unethical, and determined to hang on to most of them by every trick in the book. Th. How is an old story, and this has become more prominent now, but there is still surprisingly little outrage, unfortunately. Several books have been written about this, and excellent films, such as The Woman in Gold, have brought this subject to the fore. However, the fight for restitution of Nazi-looted artworks is seemingly unending.

I received this free ebook from Edelweiss in return for an honest review.