Fingerprints

You have to admire David Grann's confidence. He just writes the story and trusts you to keep reading, even though you have no idea where it's going. How do we feel about this? I know some of us are sick of the nut-graf discussion, but is the writer required to give away at least a foretaste of the story arc in the first section? Because we don't get it here.

Which means, if you don't keep reading, you miss the stunning revelations that crop up later. (He followed a similar structure with his piece "Trial by Fire," but in that case at least the deck headline provided some sense of the things to come. Not here.)

One thing not up for debate: Grann is one of the best reporters out there.

The story: Every few weeks, photographs of old paintings arrive at Martin Kemp's eighteenth-century house, outside Oxford, England. Many of the art works are so decayed that their once luminous colors have become washed out, their shiny coats of varnish darkened by grime and riddled with spidery cracks. Kemp scrutinizes each image with a magnifying glass, attempting to determine whether the owners have discovered what they claim to have found: a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.

Kemp, a leading scholar of Leonardo, also authenticates works of art—a rare, mysterious, and often bitterly contested skill. His opinions carry the weight of history; they can help a painting become part of the world's cultural heritage and be exhibited in museums for centuries, or cause it to be tossed into the trash.