Chiaroscuro (Cross and Vance Novel Book 3)

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 in the building is safe either, because one of those crates holds the canvas Ian Cross could not finish and could not burn, and it carries the only signature he ever left on anything.

The vault has a roll-up door, a card reader, cameras a shopping mall would find adequate, and a man named Dale. None of that is the problem. The problem is the ledger in the office upstairs, where every object in the building is written down beside the name of whoever owns it, and one entry in that ledger is worth more to the gray world than everything on the bonded floor combined. It has Cross’s true name in it.

So the finest forger alive and the reader who married him are going to do the one thing their trade forbids. They are going in through the front, in daylight, under new names, as a couple courting a seat at a table where money goes to disappear: a performed romance, a wedding neither of them planned, and vows that refuse to stay false. It takes a crew of unmanageable professionals, a fire chemist, forty degrees of temperature, and a swap that has to happen while four strangers watch.

CHIAROSCURO is the third Cross and Vance novel: literary thrillers about art, money, love, and the gray seam where all three meet. For readers of David Baldacci, John Grisham, and Daniel Silva.