Journeying to a remote French island to sit for a portrait that is painted by his tormented artist friend, an influential London art critic recalls the early years of their friendship, and his own influence over aspiring artists.

English art scholar Jonathan Argyll was amazed to find himself arrested for vagrancy-while searching for a long-lost Raphael in a tiny Roman church. Although General Bottando of the Italian National Art Theft Squad has little confidence in Jonathan's theories, Bottando's lovely assistant, Flavia di Stefano, is intrigued by the idea of a lost classic, and by Jonathan himself. But in the midst of the painting's discovery and the resultant worldwide...

A stolen masterpiece with arcane allegorical significance; a decades-old political kidnapping and murder; and, of course, a tantalizing artwork of unknown provenance -- in his seventh Jonathan Argyll art mystery, The Immaculate Deception, English art historian Iain Pears returns with a virtuosic display of ingenious plotting and literary trompe l'oeil. Pears's clever and effortlessly erudite art mysteries have found a select readership on both sides...

"In Cold War England, Professor Henry Lytten, having renounced a career in espionage, is writing a fantasy novel that dares to imagine a world less fraught than his own. He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape -- remarkably like the fantasy world Lytten had written about. There...

Someone's planning to raid an ancient monastery in Rome. But why? And when? Enter art expert Jonathan Argyll.

When a fellow of New College in seventeenth-century Oxford is found dead and a young woman is accused of his murder, four witnesses, each with his own agenda, tell what they saw, but only one speaks the truth.