The tempest - Juan Manuel De Prada

Alejandro Ballesteros, a young Spanish art historian, arrives in a wintry, misty Venice to study Giorgione's painting 'The Tempest', the subject of his thesis and the centre of his academic life. But on his first day in the city, Ballesteros witnesses a murder which propels him into a dangerous and seductive web connecting the city's rarified academic circles with a master forger; a web which leads him to witness both theft and an orgy, and to break his heart, before the murder is solved. A stylish, highly atmospheric, sensuous thriller which explores the boundaries between art and reality, truth and fakery, intellect and beauty.