Books

A forgery so perfect that everyone who touches it will be telling the truth.

It takes four minutes to add sixty years to the record. A polite, forgettable man in white cotton gloves visits five archives in three countries, and in each one leaves behind three sheets of paper — a letter, a ledger, a receipt — aged to the decade, planted in the...

The most valuable art in the world hangs in a room no one is permitted to see. Getting in means being seen.

A bonded freeport above the high desert holds eleven hundred objects and no light: paintings, bullion, and antiquities parked tax-free in the dark by people who never intend to look at them again. Nothing in the building is stolen. Nothing...

The most dangerous book in the world is a list of true names. Four hundred people are alive because nobody has read it.

For forty years, the finest maker of false identities of his generation built new people for the hunted: witnesses, defectors, women who needed to stop existing before Thursday. He died in 2005 on his own stairs, of an ordinary...

You cannot lie to the most patient reader in the gray trade. So they are going to tell him the truth. Carefully.

Ian Cross spent forty years being nobody: the finest forger of paintings alive, a hand without a name. Elena Vance was the federal reader who found him in the spaces he left. What they are to each other now has no paper on it, no...

The most dangerous man in the art world has never stolen a painting.

Ian Cross makes them. For forty years his forgeries have hung in museums, cleared auctions, and passed under the loupes of the world’s best experts, because Cross understood before anyone else what the big crime in art would become. Nobody launders money like a masterpiece. His...