A Brush with Murder!Art forgery and murder are the last things Lissa Franklin expects to encounter when her hunt for beautiful places to paint brings her to Tarrytown. Twenty miles up the Hudson River from the fame-and-money-oriented New York art scene she wants to avoid, Tarrytown has a charming Main Street where she can set up her easel and paint the way her French Impressionist heroes did. Charismatic cop Nick Bellini, whose family owns the ice cream shop in her first local painting, comes to trust her enough to ask her to be on the lookout for forgeries thought to be coming out of the area. Hesitant, but concerned that people won't understand true quality if they're misled by inferior imitations, she tells him when she sees a questionable Monet in the home of a local power couple. Then she responds to a vague request for help from a fellow artist and finds him dead in his studio. Is there a link to the forgeries? Is someone in the art community a killer? Will Lissa be the next target?This is the first novel by artist/writer Ronnie Levine, who has found happiness painting in the Hudson Rivertowns since 1998. Her paintings and prints are in many private collections. She has written numerous non-fiction articles, mostly about the arts, which have appeared in Westchester Magazine and in local newspapers and websites."Ice cream, art, and murder: this colorful novel blends forgery, trendy art-world nonsense, and a budding romance in a can't-put-it-down small-town murder mystery. Such fun!" --Joanne Dobson, author of the Karen Pelletier Mysteries"A well-written detective novel, inspired in part by a popular figure in a real town that serves as the backdrop for murder and local history. It's the most visual novel I've ever read!" Sarah Bracey White, author of "Primary Lessons: A Memoir" This version is the first edition with a revised cover. The Ice Cream Shop Detective is the first in the series The Rivertown Artist Mysteries. A follow-up is in the works.
About the Author: Ronnie Levine is an artist and writer who's been working in Westchester, New York, since 1998. Like her protagonist, she paints figurative oils influenced by the French Impressionists. With a degree in psychology but an overriding passion for art, she attended The Art Institute of Boston, The International Center of Photography, and The Art Students League of New York. She continued her training on her own by doing copies of many of her favorite master works in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, noting along the way how her works and those of the other copyists differed from the originals. Her own original oil paintings and prints are in many private collections. Painting in public led to teaching and then writing, and her numerous non-fiction articles about art and people in the arts have appeared in Westchester Magazine and local newspapers and news websites.