It was Clare Bast’s love of art that saved her from a bleak, predictable life in upstate New York and drew her to the cultured world of Manhattan’s Upper East Side where she met Jed, her doting, affluent husband. When the well-connected wife of Jed’s new boss introduces her to influential friends, Clare feels an essential part of herself coming alive again. And when she discovers that an important work painted by the subject of her unfinished dissertation is hanging in the brownstone of a seductively attractive dealer, she believes fate is leading her where she belongs...until she finds herself at the scene of a gruesome murder and a stolen masterpiece. Suddenly, Clare is trapped inside a dark and treacherous art world filled with unscrupulous dealers and international criminals.

Florence Darrow has always felt she was destined for greatness, but after a disastrous affair with her married boss, she starts to doubt herself. All that changes when she sets off for Morocco with her new boss, the celebrated but reclusive author Maud Dixon. Amidst the colorful streets of Marrakesh and the windswept beaches of the coast, Florence begins to feel she’s leading the sort of interesting, cosmopolitan life she deserves. But when she wakes up in the hospital after a terrible car accident, with no memory of the previous night --- and no sign of Maud --- a dangerous idea begins to take form.