This story was told in a time-flipping manner, alternating between the present day and the past. The present day story concerns Marcus Elliot, an English-Swedish art dealer gone bust and plagued by a bad reputation he does not deserve and the story set in the past concerns Zoia Korvin-Krukovsky, an obscure, real-life Russian artist – the last survivor of the Romanov Court, recently deceased. Marcus has been hired to write the catalog for an upcoming auction of Zoia’s work – paintings on gold. Some of her works are missing and Elliot, who has been obsessed for much of his life by Zoia, hopes to find them somewhere along the way. In fact, one of the items popularly thought to be missing, is actually in his possession, bought by his Swedish mother many years ago when Marcus was a boy. The painting became a bone of contention between his mother and father and his mother killed herself shortly thereafter.

I was never on fire for this book. It reminded me, marginally, of the first Girl With… book by Larsson. Sweden. A mystery. Piles of ephemera to be gotten through. A freezing cold house in the middle of the winter. The searcher, a man whose private and professional life is a mess. A mysterious girl who appears out of nowhere becoming the searcher’s lover and helping him with the mystery. Unscrupulous, evil people bent upon hindering the searcher’s search. But it was not anywhere near as interesting. Part of the problem may have been that Sington was hampered by Zoia being a real person. There was little room for manipulation. Fictionalizing of a real person’s life can only be played with just so much, or so it seems to me. To go way out on a limb seems to me to be risking some giant problems – even with the life of someone as super obscure as Zoia. Over all, I'd characterize this book as readable, but not mesmerizingly wonderful. ( )