When an artist forges an old master painting for the Gestapo she enters a world where nothing and no one is what they seem.
Isabella Blunt, an Italian woman married to an English art historian, hides from the fact of war in her studio. Until one day she is offered a commission that will force her out of her ivory castle.
When later the boy she is using as a model is arrested in connection with a bomb attack on a brothel frequented by German soldiers and the secret police arrive at her door she is forced to begin to question all the loyalties that root her to the person she has always believed herself to be.
In Florence in 1944 appearances are deceitful. It is a city of informers, spies, torturers, insurgents, exiles and renegades in hiding. But no one can be trusted to be who they say they are.