Travelling through France with her husband, television journalist Jane insists on visiting an obscure château whose name she half-remembers.

Soon she's on the trail. Accumulating events around disputed paintings, forged documents, wartime secrets and suspicious deaths—it becomes an art-historical mystery in which questions of authenticity become inseparable from questions of motive.

Marrin builds the novel around the unstable authority of looking. Paintings, archives and reputations all appear to offer evidence, yet each can be arranged to produce the desired story. Jane’s investigation moves between France, London and New York, following the possible connection between a seventeenth-century painter, a noble family’s collection and material someone has taken considerable trouble to bury.

The result is a distinctly late-1980s literary thriller: intelligent, research-heavy and preoccupied with the institutions that decide what counts as genuine. It will suit readers drawn to art crime, archival detection and protagonists whose curiosity is both their professional instrument and their most reliable route into catastrophe.

First edition, Faber and Faber, 1988. Hardcover with dust jacket; light rubbing and surface wear to jacket, internally clean and sound.