| Format: Hardcover, 256pp. ISBN: 0786710535 Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group Pub. Date: August 2002 "Sloane at sixty is a talented if conventionally unsuccessful painter who has just finished serving two years in an English prison for art forgery. On his return to his studio in North London he discovers among the junk mail and trash a letter forwarded to him two months earlier from an old address. Though Sloane does not recognize immediately the sender's spidery hand, he will never forget the barely decipherable name - Jane Graham - on the back of the envelope. Nor can he now resist the summons of the older, more celebrated artist with whom he'd had a passionate affair four decades before, during his bohemian days, in New York. In Pisa, at Jane's deathbed, Sloane learns that with her he fathered a child, Connie, from whom she has in recent years become estranged. Jane's last wish is that Sloane find their daughter." Sloane agrees, but his trouble only begins when he locates the confused, edgy Connie. Let alone that she is wasting her bluesy voice singing In New York's low-class jazz clubs; she is wasting her life on Vincent Delaney, her volatile, mob-connected manager who may have killed his last mistress and has brutalized two others. Sloane could leave, but an unfamiliar paternal instinct pulls him, instead, into a maelstrom of criminal violence, a risky police investigation, painful alliances, hard truths, and increasingly dangerous consequences. |
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