This work is set in Stockholm, 1999. Madam Zoia, the enigmatic painter on gold, is dead. The last-known survivor of the Romanov court, she leaves behind a house full of paintings, a collection of private papers, and a mystery. Marcus Elliot has been commissioned to travel to Sweden to write the catalogue that will accompany the sale of her work. But something feels wrong. The gilded serenity of Zoia's work reflects nothing of her passionate private life: a dramatic escape from the Revolutionary torturers of the Lubyanka, an artistic journey that embraced the excesses of Bohemian Paris, and an unearthly ability to command the devotion of beautiful men. Marcus is to be Zoia's last, triumphant, seduction but with time against him, he must lay his own ghosts to rest - the scandal that ruined him, the tragedy that shattered his childhood before the priceless truth can come within his grasp.