Feint of Art (Art Lover's Mystery, 1)

At ten, painting a perfect Mona Lisa made Annie Kincaid a prodigy. A similar copy at seventeen made her a crook. Lesson learned: genuine art is priceless, and forgery gets you arrested. Now Annie puts her artistic talents to honest use as a faux finisher in San Francisco. But her past may not be painted over as well as she thought . . . Annie's got bad news for her ex-boyfriend, curator Ernst Pettigrew: the snooty Brock Museum's new fifteen-million-dollar Caravaggio painting is as fake as a three-dollar bill. And the same night Annie makes her shattering appraisal, the janitor on duty is killed-and Ernst disappears. To top it all off, a well-known art dealer has absconded with multiple Old Master drawings, leaving yet more forgeries in their places. Finding the originals-and pocketing the reward money-will get Annie's new landlord off her back. But it could also draw her into the underworld of fakes and forgers she swore she'd left behind, starting with a close encounter with a changeable but charming art thief . . .