Attribution (Cross and Vance Novel Book 5)

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 dark, and pointing at a single painting an ocean away. He isn’t stealing anything. He’s building a lie so patient that honest people will do the rest: find it, verify it, publish it, believe it.

Ian Cross knows the work when he sees it, because once it would have been his. He and Elena Vance walked away from the trade to a house by a lake and the quiet they’d never expected to keep. But the man in the gloves is settling a debt with their name on it — and the mark at the end of the chain is worth more than any of them have ever dared to move.

To beat a perfect provenance, the family will have to build one of their own. One canvas. One signature. One number that hurts enough to hunt, and not a dollar over.

Attribution is the fifth novel in the Cross and Vance series — a slow-burn heist of archives, art, and the oldest question in the trade: whose hand made the thing, and who gets to say so.