A mysterious French nobleman arrives at Ekaterina Tuomonova's gallery in Chelsea, London. He is in search of an expert in early 20th century Post Impressionist art. Olivier de la Salle proposes John and Ekaterina visit his château in Provence, in the South of France, where he needs help in identifying a collection of paintings long forgotten in the recesses of his château.
The story explores the world of art and art dealers with their immensely rich clients, collectors and oligarchs, crooks and forgers, auction houses and museums, the vast sums of money that art attracts today, artists and their friends, their wealth and their misery, their mistresses and their patrons. It is the Belle Epoque, then comes World War I, the Russian Revolution, followed by World War II and the looting by the Nazis of Museums and Jewish families in 1940, and finally the arrival of Russian oligarchs who spend hundreds of millions of dollars to own the works of Picasso, Modigliani and their fellow artists who lived when Paris was the cultural centre of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century.