The execution of a genius . . . The incarnation of evil . . . A spine-chilling journey into the art of darkness . . .
The middle of an English summer. The 3am dark of a west London basement. Everything changing because of a phone call. Later on, Nick saw it as the moment his life came apart.
Somewhere along the road Nicholas Greer got lost. The life of Frank Spira, the controversial British painter he's been researching for the past six years, has become more real to him than his own.
But the book's written now. Finished. At least it looks that way until he gets a call telling him that Spira's ex-lover, Jacob Grossman, a man who went missing twenty-six years ago, a man everyone thought was dead, is in Manhattan, a street person now, an eighty-four-year-old bum.
Tracking Grossman to a hostel on the Lower East Side, Nick hopes for answers to the unresolved questions. Instead, he gets news of a picture - a painting supposedly executed by Spira in Tangier in 1957, a painting supposedly destroyed. The artist's only religious work, if it existed, the Incarnation would now be worth over six million dollars. If it existed . . .
An hour after the interview, Jacob Grossman is butchered in his room.
Harried by the New York police, betrayed by his publisher, abandoned by his wife, Nick goes back to his sources and, fact by fact, lie by lie, starts to uncover a flaw in the heart of Spira's life, a dark seam that runs all the way back to Tangier.
Only as he closes in on the sinister truth, does he realise he too has become the object of someone's scrutiny . . . a Collector for whom the Incarnation is Spira's greatest achievement.
