Seren - by Peter Gooch (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

It's 1978, and the art scene in the Midwest is booming. Successful Detroit gallery owner Fairchild Moss secretly yearns to return to his first love-painting. When he comes into possession of a mysterious masterpiece, his life takes an unexpected turn. Perplexed by the imprint of a nipple in the thick paint, Moss is determined to unravel the painting's mystery. So begins a darkly comic quest to uncover the story behind the eerie masterpiece and to locate the elusive muse who inspired it.

Review Quotes

"A page-turning thriller, a meditation on art, and a touching exploration of second chances, Peter Gooch's Seren is a novel that does all that." - Adam Prince, author of The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men

"In this arresting novel, Peter Gooch uses his impressive talents as a writer and painter to craft a gripping mystery centered on a masterpiece by landscape painter Norris Bainbridge. . . . Gooch's hand with narrative and description is sure, and his knowledge of the milieu and characters carries the story along with satirical panache and absorbing suspense. Seren is at once a sharply comic satire of the art scene, a canny meditation on the nature of art, and an entirely absorbing murder mystery. Buy it. Read it. Enjoy." - Arnold Johnston, novelist, playwright, poet, and author of Swept Away, The Witching Voice and Where We're Going, Where We've Been

"Peter Gooch's Seren is above all a good read, suspenseful, comic, and diverting. Drawing on his own career as a fine visual artist, Gooch constructs a puzzle centered on the life and death of a renowned and reclusive painter, Norris Bainbridge, the key to whose demise is Seren, his beautiful and enigmatic muse. This novel skewers the pretensions and infighting of the art world in the context of a thoroughly satisfying mystery that will make readers laugh and think." - Deborah Ann Percy, fiction writer, playwright, and author of Invisible Traffic and Dream Time (Susan Smith Blackburn Award Finalist)

"Seren is a tour de force that dives into an artist's deepest desires-a glimpse of immortality, or his signature on the ceiling of the local bar beside other renowned artists. Peter Gooch offers a cast of lively, well-rounded characters in an affluent artists' world. The plot line quivers with energy and mystery as Fairchild Moss, a competent Midwest artist/art dealer, renews his singular talent for painting. Rooted in an archetypal battle between darkness and light, Moss is possessed by traces of the elusive and feral Seren, an artist's model. It appears that she has circled the death of three artists who displayed with their last brushstrokes across the broad canvas of life a luminous splash of creation. Is she the muse his vision requires, or is she nature's duende? Will a perfect fit with Seren's lithe body produce a work of genius? Or will the artist sell his soul in a Faustian bargain for his signature on the ceiling?" - Phaedra Greenwood, author of Beside the Rio Hondo and coauthor of Those Were the Days: Life and love in 1970s New Mexico