He is a man with a hidden, complicated past - some of it perhaps unspeakably violent, much of it spent in thrall to an almost slavish fascination with seventeenth-century Flemish art. Now he is lured, unknowing, into a scheme to authenticate a set of suspect paintings, and - as if in payment for his work, as if from out of the paintings themselves - a mysterious woman emerges into his life and merges with it. She seems to him to come alive only under his gaze.

The mix of detachment and passion that fuels her reminds him of, and then gradually taps into, his own darkest impulses. And as their affair grows more dangerous and compulsive, he begins to sense that it is being mirrored, perhaps even prefigured, in the paintings themselves. Yet nothing forewarns him of the moment when the forgery scheme will be brought to light and its unexpected, crushing ramifications abruptly revealed.