A whodunit set in the art world. The protagonist is Julia, an art restoration expert in Madrid who is cleaning a 15th Century painting. The painting shows a duke and his knight playing chess and the story begins when, with the aid of x-rays, Julia discovers an inscription hidden in a corner, "Who killed the knight?"

Vicky Bliss, peerless art historian and sleuth, searches for solutions to more than one heinous offense in the ever-shifting sands of Egypt's mysterious Valley of the Kings. When her longtime significant other, John Tregarth, the suave and dangerously charming international art thief, is accused of taking a world-famous, one-of-a-kind historic relic, it is up to Bliss to clear his name.

Boston art historian Sweeney St. George investigates the gravestone of a girl who drowned under mysterious circumstances one hundred years earlier, setting in motion a series of events that places Sweeney in the path of a present-day killer.

"A picture is worth a thousand words but the photograph art historian Vicky Bliss has just received gives rise to a thousand questions instead. At first glance it appears to be the famous portrait of Frau Schliemann adorned in the gold of Troy. But closer study reveals the picture to be contemporary -- which is odd since Vicky knows the Trojan gold vanished sometime around the end of World War Two. And if she needed further proof that something was...

"Whenever I'm in survival mode I find myself magnetised by museums and galleries, like people running for air raid shelters in wartime." The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled...

When art historian Keira Foley is hired to authenticate a painting at a centuries-old East Suffolk manor, she hopes this is just the thing to get her career and life back on track. But from the time she arrives at Parham Hill Estate and begins working alongside rumored art thief Emory Scott, she's left with far more questions than answers. As Keira begins to unravel the mystery behind the portrait of the queen, two women emerge from the estate's forgotten...

"This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. In his earlier, award-winning novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape...