When Richard Underberg's fiancee, Claudine d'Este, receives a mysterious phone call from a dying German lawyer to restore film from World War II and decipher codes in a notebook, it is a request she cannot refuse. Closely shadowed by the enigmatic Dominique Prideux, who appears to be an art thief, Underberg and d'Este find themselves on a trail of plundered art. Complicating everything is the legacy of Underberg's father, a decorated German solider in 1918 and then a Jewish-German refugee in 1936. The novel begins in Cape Town, but traverses the art world of Europe, and the red dunes of the...