SUMMARY

Edward Ransome is one of England’s most famous artists – rich, a friend to celebrities and known for his devotion to his craft for almost fifty years.

Then someone steals his favourite painting – the painting that set Ransome on course to fame and fortune but was never sold and rarely seen.

Sam Dyke is hired to find the painting, and the thief, but quickly discovers that the loss of the painting is only one of the many losses suffered by Ransome, and his family.

This intriguing epigraph opens the book: “What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents have not lived.” (Carl Jung) And the story does span generations. The family at the heart of the book splintered long ago. Each damaged member has determinedly not thought in years about the events which lie at the bottom of the book’s central mystery. Now Sam Dyke comes knocking on their doors, hired to get to the bottom of a puzzle which nobody realises, to begin with, is related to their ongoing, familial unhappiness. Dyke unwittingly puts each of them, and himself, in danger when he does so.

Indeed, the book is as much an examination of the damage families can do to their members as it is a novel about forgery and death.

Dixon draws in a variety of strands to enrich the book. It is a testament to his skilful plotting that none of them feel like red herrings (although one or two of them are).

The book is beautifully written and cruises along like a well-maintained Bentley.

Judi Moore

Extract

Ransome had been watching me inspect the painting, his jaw immobile. ‘It’s not bad. Someone who knows what they’re doing.’

‘Is it close to the original?’

‘The sky’s wrong, as I’ve explained, and the proportions of the rocks are not right.’

‘Where is it?’

‘A made-up place. Somewhere from my imagination.’

‘Is it—’

‘The light is always changing. And it depends on the time of year what kind of tint it has.’

‘You make it sound like a real place.’

For the first time, a softer expression touched his eyes. ‘Real places always live in the imagination, don’t they?’