A year after the events of Beethoven’s Bagatelle, Kingsley Mills has somehow managed to improve his life. He is sober, sort-of dating Detective Sergeant Marnie Morrison, and has acquired a lucrative new client in GAZ—the Bulgarian crime syndicate he would much rather not disappoint.

Then Grozdan Golubev shows him two apparently identical prints by the late Franco-Hungarian artist Anton Karvaly.

Both are numbered 8/20.
Both have impeccable provenance.
And according to the experts, both are genuine.

For GAZ, with millions invested in Karvaly’s work, that is considerably more worrying than discovering a simple fake.

While Mills follows a trail through auction houses, forgotten print workshops and the increasingly peculiar Karvaly market, Morrison has problems of her own. Temporarily assigned to diplomatic protection, she manages to lose the nineteen-year-old daughter of a senior Togolese diplomat from a Mayfair fitting room.

Then the ransom note arrives.

What begins as two entirely separate problems gradually starts moving towards one another—and Mills and Morrison discover that authenticity can be a considerably more dangerous question than forgery.

For once, Mills thought he had been given a safe case.
He was mistaken.