Provenance

The year is 1993. Christina Perretti, working as an investigator with Interpol's new art crimes unit out of Rome, discovers, through the recovery of a lost Egon Schiele painting in Moscow, a cache of notes from a notorious Berlin art dealer for the Nazis, Harry Maes. The notes are addressed to his son Nikolaus, but they concern the provenance of a number of paintings believed to have been in Maes's possession at the time of his death. As Perretti seeks to recover these works, all presumed to be stolen from Jewish families during the Second World War, she discovers a decades-old plot to save some of the Vatican's greatest treasures from the Nazis and a web of intrigue and murder involving those seeking to profit from the burgeoning grey and black markets in the former Eastern Bloc. Provenance pieces together one family's legacy, what was lost and recovered at the moment once thought to mark the end of history. "Provenance is a novel that reads like the best trade non-fiction. It is thoroughly researched, entirely plausible and feels like it could be a true story. There are treasures stolen by, and hidden from, the Nazis still out there, waiting to be found. Here's an intelligent classic-in-the-making on just that theme."-Dr Noah Charney,Best-selling author of The 12-Hour Art Expert