The Artist Is A Thief: Stephen Gray

Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is an internationally renowned Aboriginal artist from the remote Mission Hole community in the Northern Territory. Her works command high prices - until a new painting is unveiled. It is discovered slashed with the words hastily scrawled across it: the artist is a thief. Is the artist a thief? Is she to blame or is she the victim of someone else's fraud? And here is where this detective novel diverges, into a world where everyone except the 'detective' knows the rules. Jean-Loup Wild, a Melbourne financial consultant sent by ATSIC to Mission Hole, is caught between the art world with its wealth, fashions, heroes and sophisticated private language and the Aboriginal community with its poverty, social problems, kinship ties and unchanging traditional law. If Jean-Loup can find the artist he can begin to find the secret of what's been happening at Mission Hole. He can also begin to understand how the layers of that mystery lie deep in the bedrock of Australian society.