Modern master painter Jacob Molnar turned his back on the art world in the mid-1970s, licking self-inflicted wounds after a divorce and repulsed by the art scene's mixture of hype and greed. But when a young painter whom he would ordinarily have no time for comes to Molnar a decade later with what might be evidence of a lucrative art scam, Molnar is intrigued. That painter is murdered shortly afterward, so Molnar re-enters the high stakes world he'd left behind, wanting justice and hoping that that the inside knowledge he once had might serve him well without making him even more cynical or reclusive.