Thomas Swan is a former copywriter and television producer, and vice president of an advertising agency. Having released the art historical thriller “The Hunt for Cezanne” in 1997, he suddenly became famous - the book became a bestseller and received a lot of critical praise; Swan was even called “the American answer to Ian Pierce” and was elected president of the New York branch of the Crime Writers Association of America.

In this novel, mysterious criminals are being destroyed all over the world - in the St. Petersburg Hermitage, in the London National Gallery, in private collections – Cezanne’s self-portraits with the obvious goal of driving up the prices of surviving paintings to the skies. When, after the destruction of another canvas, the curator of the British collection in which this self-portrait was kept is killed, and in an extremely exotic way, the stakes rise even higher...