The Immaculate Deception

From internationally bestselling author Iain Pears comes the seventh in his Jonathan Argyll series -- an intriguing mystery of love, loss, and artistic license.For newlywed and Italian art theft squad head Flavia di Stefano, the honeymoon is over when a painting, borrowed from the Louvre and en route to a celebratory exhibition, is stolen. Desperate to avoid public embarrassment -- and to avoid paying a ransom -- the Italian prime minister leans hard on Flavia to get it back quickly and quietly.Across town, her husband, art historian Jonathan Argyll, begins an investigation of his own, tracing the past of a small Renaissance painting -- an Immaculate Conception -- owned by Flavia's mentor, retired general Taddeo Bottando. Soon both husband and wife uncover astonishing and chilling secrets, and Flavia's investigation takes a sudden turn from the search for an art thief to the hunt for a murderer.

Iain Pears, bestselling author of An Instance of the Fingerpost, is an art historian with a doctorate in art history from Oxford. He wrote his first Jonathan Argyll crime novel, The Raphael Affair, while his wife was teaching at Smith College in the late 1980s. His other books in the Argyll series are The Titian Committee, The Bernini Bust, The Last Judgement, Giotto's Hand, and Death and Restoration. He is also the author of The Discovery of Painting, published by Yale University Press. He lives in Oxford, England.