She hid the truth inside her paintings. Then someone killed her for it. When artist Evelyn Blake is found dead in her coastal studio, Detective Clara Reed sees what everyone else misses: the room is too clean. The brushes too neat. And pressed into the wet paint of Evelyn's last canvas - where a signature should be - is a mark Clara has seen before. In her grandfather's handwriting. On a case someone tried very hard to make disappear seventy years ago. Evelyn wasn't just a painter. She was building a case - hiding evidence of a century-old corruption network inside her work, painting toward a stranger she trusted would come. Clara is that stranger. And Amelia Voss - elegant, composed, and the most dangerous person in any room she enters - already knows it. The art is the alibi. The ledger is the point.