<b>A smart, sweeping novel--at once satirical and moving--about love, a famous lost painting, and a dark secret from the past, set in the London art world.</b><br><br>Annie McDee, thirty-one and recovering from the end of a long-term relationship, is chef for two sinister art dealers. She's just spent her meager savings on a dusty junk-shop painting for her new, unsuitable, boyfriend. But when he doesn't show up for his birthday dinner, it becomes hers. And amazingly, the painting speaks--though only we hear &quot;him.&quot; Shrewd, spoiled, charming, world weary, and cynical, he comments, from his unique perspective, on Annie and the modern world, but he also recounts tales of his previous owners: Louis XV, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great, among them. Once it becomes known that Annie has the painting--whose provenance involves the Nazis--she finds herself at the center of a frantic, and sometimes fiendish, scramble among dealers, collectors, and other highly interested parties, for its ownership. It's a dazzlingly irreverent and entertaining many-layered tale of a devious world where, however improbably, love will triumph.