Pentimento (Cross and Vance Novel Book 2)

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 ring, and no law, and it is the realest thing either of them owns.

It is also the thread that can unravel them both. Somebody with old money and older patience has bought a question: who is the hand? To carry it they have hired Adrian Vey, a gray courteous man who does not break people, does not follow people, and has never once failed to find one. Vey closes distances. And when reading is not enough, his clients have another instrument, a soft-spoken man who visits the dying and brings soup.

You cannot outrun a reader like Vey, and you cannot feed him a lie. He has eaten better lies than anyone can build. So Cross and Vance set out to do the one thing nobody in the trade has tried. They will construct a truth for him to find: a pentimento, an earlier image laid down beneath the surface of the world, made to be discovered honestly by the best eyes alive. Pulling it off takes a crew of gifted, unmanageable professionals, a con with no room for a wrong stroke, and a dying painter with one secret worth more than every canvas she ever signed.

PENTIMENTO is the second 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.