Black Market

Tine ( Midnight City ) transcends the thriller genre with this riveting tale of an all-black American unit of the quartermaster corps during the liberation of Rome in 1944. In present-day New York City, the elevator operator in a posh apartment building asks an art dealer resident to evaluate a painting left to his mother--a black hospital worker who lives in Harlem--by her father, James Holt, who had been a career soldier. When the painting turns out to be an extremely valuable work by a 17th-century Italian master, the dealer hires art investigator Harry Leblanc to trace its provenance so that it can go to auction. After securing Holt's army record, Leblanc seeks out the witnesses to the single questionable action in Holt's otherwise exemplary career. The story, unfurling mainly in flashback, is a deft depiction of wartime Rome. Holt's black unit, run by white non-coms with Mafia connections and a blue-blood lieutenant with a yen for fast cash, is quick-marched into the Roman black market. Tine blends impoverished Italian nobility, Army bureaucrats, South African bigots, eccentric Brits and Holt, with his demand for dignity and justice, to yield a rich palette. A genius at characterization, he indelibly etches the personalities of this wildly diverse cast of players. (Feb.)