Dr Reggie Lee, newly arrived at the National Gallery, is putting together a small exhibition around three Caravaggios depicting 'St Cecilia and the Angel'. One is at the Getty, one at the Louvre, and she hopes it won't be too hard to track down the third. But a series of inexplicable obstacles keep getting in her way - and then, unexpectedly, a fourth Caravaggio turns up. One of them must be a fake. But which? When people start to die, it seems clear that someone doesn't want Reggie's show to go ahead. Why, she can't imagine. But her career is at stake, and she'd damned if she'll let herself be intimidated and bullied by these unseen forces. So Reggie investigates and her research takes her from Surrealist suicides to shady Italian art dealers, from seventeenth-century painting techniques to modern French politics in a viciously-fought Presidential election year. By the end it seems as though nobody in the opaque and ill-defined world of art can really stay incorruptible - perhaps not even Reggie herself.

Bill Kohn's painting, Udaipur Tinsmiths, underlies the 45,000-year history of representational art, beginning with the evolutionarily maladaptive cave paintings and concluding with the starkly abstract and two-dimensional modernistic paintings that exemplify the utopian metanarrative of Clement Greenberg that postmodernism soundly repudiated. That particular repudiation may have been the only misjudgment by posmodernism because the modernistic art thrived into the 21st century. Unfortunately if crowded out from museum walls newer figurative, three-dimensional paintings more rich in content and mystery.