It is easy for everyone to get the wrong impression. Especially when a senior police officer on a drugs investigation, various members of the fine art trade and a superb forger have been murdered or subjected to ferocious attacks.

The man trying to make sense of these events is Tim Simpson of White's Bank and its Art Investment Fund, but the resistance to his vengeful investigation of the hideous assault on his now-comatose friend, Nobby Roberts, is widespread: Scotland Yard, his girlfriend Sue Westerman, the art dealer Morris Goldsworth and a nurse with a vital clue all react to him with hostility.

Even Jeremy White, Tim's chief at the Bank, while keen for Tim and the Art Fund to acquire an Impressionist painting by Monet or Pissarro, who both painted some famous London canvases during their escape from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, seems to have entirely the wrong impression about Tim's motives, especially where the nurse is concerned.

Or has he?

From the pinnacle of the art business in Bond Street, via London's working suburbs to a meeting in Lower Norwood, Tim stalks his lethal opponents through a difficult, adversarial world where even a dead man's little detective-joke leads to murderous consequences.