Nimrod’s Shadow

Nimrod’s Shadow
By Chris Paling
Portobello £12.99, 344 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

On the eve of his first London exhibition, Edwardian painter TF Reilly receives a visit from the renowned critic Gower: fame beckons and poverty may yet be avoided. But when Gower is found dead in a canal with his eyes plucked out, Reilly becomes prime suspect. A scarcely believable alibi, courtesy of the painter’s beloved Jack Russell terrier, Nimrod, seems unlikely to save the painter from the hangman’s noose.

A comic study in human resilience, Chris Paling’s satisfying yarn sets Reilly’s story against that of Samantha, a gloriously self-possessed and occasionally delusional 21st-century secretary who becomes obsessed with the artist’s paintings.

Underneath the high jinks of Soho’s gallery world and death-cell melodrama in Edwardian London is a novel of ideas that considers both the way that an artist’s creations can reach down through the years and the role that the viewer plays in interpreting any work of art.