The well-tailored art collector with a walking stick offered Hank Tower, an ex-spy now a New York PI, a million dollars to recover his stolen masterpiece. But the job came with a warning. Since its creation five centuries ago the multi-million-dollar painting has left a trail of horrors for those who possess it. Whether they are English Dukes or Venetian Doges, whoever has the painting winds up murdered. Tower was told by an art dealer familiar with its history to stay away from it, that it was cursed. But the gentleman’s fee was too large to resist.
The search for the painting takes Tower and his two associates from the Gold Coast of Westport, Connecticut, to New York’s luxury hotels to Manhattan’s Soho district to the bars of Little Italy. Along the way he encounters…
a rich art-collecting couple turned thieves…
ex-British MI6 agents turned thieves and killers…
a naive art dealer and a successful lawyer who accidentally possess the painting and pay dearly for it…
a high-living, professional art thief fresh out of a Paris prison who wants to find it before Tower does…
a beautiful insurance agent who wants to work with Tower for non-business reasons.
Carbon testing suggests the painting is the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, which makes it worth around a half-billion dollars. But Tower discovers that his smartly dressed client needs it back for a reason even more pressing than its value, a reason large enough to endanger Western civilization itself.