Irving Bradley, international star of the concert platform, is used to having the best in life and paying for it. So when his old violin teacher is killed by a hit-and-run driver, he hires Ken Scott - the man he was brought up to hate - to track down the killer. As an M15 veteran, Ken knows that the death was murder but cannot convince Irving, who swaps the old woman's legacy, an Impressionist painting, for a Stradivarius. But the painting turns out to be Nazi loot from World War II and the violin teacher's identity as false as a spy's legend. Was she a Resistance heroine in Occupied Paris, tortured by the Gestapo, or a traitor working for the Germans? Or could she have been one of hundreds of Soviet agents planted in post-war Britain? And how does this tie in with her death fifty years later? Aided by an ex-CIA man, Erich Hallstatt, Ken and Irving uncover the biggest single art theft of the twentieth century.