In this sequel to Harmony in Flesh and Black, the debut of Kilmer’s mystery series set in the Boston art world, we’re reacquainted with the passionate non-collector Fred Taylor. Fred, prowling the antique and jumble shops of Boston’s Charles Street, enters a favorite old haunt—Oona’s—run by a woman unafraid to deal in art with a questionable past.

Oona offers Fred a painting, the image of a common gray squirrel on a chain, which he discovers has been cut from a larger canvas. Believing it was painted by an important eighteenth-century American master, he snaps up the fragment and then sets out to find the rest of the work of art. Murder, mayhem, and vandalism soon join the violence already associated with the painting.