Provenance (Cross and Vance Novel Book 1)

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 work is patient, flawless, and invisible, and the men who use it are richer than some countries.

Elena Vance reads paper for the federal government. Records, ledgers, provenance files: she reads them the way other investigators read faces, and she has never met a document that could lie to her twice. Then a routine fraud file turns up a hole the size of a painting, and at the bottom of the hole is a hand no database has a name for.

What follows is a duel between the two best readers in a quiet trade: a forger who has spent his life not existing, and the one investigator alive who can see him in the spaces he leaves. But the deeper Vance follows the paper, the more it reads like a warning. Cross is not the biggest lie in the file. And the machine she serves may want the truth even less than he does.

Smart, dry, and propulsive, PROVENANCE opens the Cross and Vance series: literary thrillers about art, money, love, and the gray seam where all three meet. For readers of David Baldacci, John Grisham, and Daniel Silva.