The Bellini Madonna

Summary: "Thomas Lynch was once a brilliant young art historican. Now he is a disgraced, middle-aged historian, overly fond of the bottle and of his fresh young students. But everything will change now that he's on the trail of a lost masterpiece, a legendary Madonna by the Italian master Giovanni Belline. Insinuating himeself into the crumbling English manor house where the painting may be concealed, Lynch attemps to gull the eccentric and perversely beautiful women who live there - though he himself seems to be the pawn in his elaborate game. A Victorian diary that draws Robert Browning into the painting's complicated provenance might provide the key - if only Lynch can manage to beat his hosts in the search. In the end, it will be Lynch's own vulnerable heart that betrays the betrayer. Interlaced with complex clues and hidden jokes, The Bellini Madonna reels from the lush English countryside to the sternely lovely hill tonws of the Veneto, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first."--Inside front jacket.