FICTION

THE TITIAN COMMITTEE by Iain Pears (Harcourt Brace: $19.95; 189 pp.) It is a tribute to the genre that when a young woman expires in a Venice flower bed you care more about the bruised posies. (Art historians are a dime a dozen but not too many lilies grow in Venice). This is a puzzle mystery, the kind pioneered by Agatha Christie with her vicars and constables and arsenic in the fish paste.

Louise Masterson is dead, to be sure, and a couple of her Titian Committee colleagues will croak as well before the last vernissage. No matter. Far more intriguing is the long-defunct Venetian master whose works the committee has been formed to study in situ. Did Titian really woo and win the mistress of his master, Giorgione? Is that her, the succulent Violante di Modena, in the pictures Titian painted for the monks of Padua? Further, is one of the committee members authenticating fake Titians for a piece of the action? And who stole the old marchesa’s collection? Dispatched to sort it all out is Flavia di Stefano of the Italian National Art Theft Squad. Muddying the trail is the local police chief, who’s convinced that all murders are done by “Sicilians or some other sorts of foreigners.”

The prose is light and sassy, and just complicated enough to hold our interest. The denouement comes in the last chapter, with all the suspects gathered round to hear the exegesis. Agatha would have loved it.