The unknown beauty

Isabelle Silva, owner of a Parisian art gallery, makes a formidable team with her grandfather Julien when it comes to tracing stolen or missing paintings. But the picture called The Unknown Beauty holds a mystery – connected not only with art but also with love ...

Isabelle Silva runs the Galerie Lumière in Paris together with her eccentric grandfather Julien. But this is merely a cover for their real secret passion: tracing missing or stolen paintings.

When the attractive but somewhat mysterious art and antique dealer Andrew Palmer commissions her to buy a painting by John Singer Sargent at an auction, it seems just a routine assignment. But their business relationship becomes complicated when Palmer falls in love with Isabelle and remains constantly at her side. And the mystery thickens when he claims that he only bought the old painting because he had encountered the unknown beauty in the mid-19^th-century painting in the flesh in a night train to Barcelona.

It is clear to Isabelle that the painting can only be a forgery. But then it is stolen, and the traces of the picture and its mysterious subject lead via Vienna, Paris and Barcelona to Venice, a city where both love and danger await. And where Isabelle Silva is in danger of coming to grief as she tries to solve the puzzle ...

Ingenious construction and a gripping narrative style: a romantic mystery thriller with surprising turns of events and a breathtaking finale.