Sitdown Sunday: How an amateur art sleuth cracked a 43-year cold case [Video]

IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.

We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.

1. The art detective

File image. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

When nine paintings vanished from a Massachusetts mansion in 1978, the police investigation went nowhere for 43 years, until an amateur sleuth was put on the case. 

(Vanity Fair, approx 40 mins reading time)

A collector and art lover, Schorer is above all a dedicated investigator. He compares the way his mind works to those wall-mounted corkboards in classic crime shows, the kind with thumbtacked photos of suspects and murder scenes and corroborating evidence, all linked together by pieces of string. Instead of a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass, he uses precision binocular headband magnifiers, large benchtop microscopes, reverse​-image searches in online databases, and high-tech tactics, such as MA-XRF spectroscopy or dendrochronology, that apply …