When Chaz Wilmot is offered a job restoring a Venetian palace fresco, he immediately sees it is more a forgery than a restoration. But he is soon seduced by the challenge and, little by little, enters a secret world of gangsters, greed, and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all.

An artist born outside his time, Chaz Wilmot can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough--and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. His unique abilities attract the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present, and soon Wilmot is working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years. But his creative burst is accompanied by strange interludes--memories that are not memories . . . and he begins to wonder if he is really the person he believes he is. When a previously unknown masterpiece by the Spanish painter Velázquez is discovered, the artist suddenly finds himself lost in a mirrored house of illusions--and propelled into a secret world of greed, lies . . . and murder.