When French expatriate Tristan Mourault becomes enamored with fifteen-year-old Karen Miller, he "rescues" her from her working-class circumstances and stages her death to mask his true crime. Years later, Karen is now "Gisèle" and lives with Tristan in rarefied Devon, Washington. She has married another man to keep up appearances, but when her daughter'stumbles upon a secret cache of paintings—all nudes of Gisèle—Tristan's carefully curated world begins to crumble. Set against a byzantine backdrop of greed, artifice, and manipulation—with tantalizing echoes of — keeps its most devastating secrets right up until the very last page.