Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon is in Venice repairing an altarpiece by Veronese when he receives an urgent summons from the Italian police. The eccentric London art dealer Julian Isherwood has stumbled upon a chilling murder scene in Lake Como, and is being held as a suspect. To save his friend, Gabriel must track down the real killers and then perform one simple task: find the most famous missing painting in the world.

Sometimes the best way to find a stolen masterpiece is to steal another one.

The dead man is a fallen spy with a secret: he's been trafficking in stolen artworks and selling them to a mysterious collector. Among those paintings is the world's most iconic missing masterpiece: Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.

Gabriel embarks on a daring gambit to recover the Caravaggio that will take him on an exhilarating hunt, from Marseilles to Corsica, ti Paris and London, and, finally, to a small private bank in Austria, where a dangerous man stands guard over the ill-gotten wealth of one of the world's most brutal dictators.