"The MacGuffin is a Leonardo painting called Madonna Litta, presently owned by the great Hermitage art museum but about to be sold secretly, with many payoffs, to a Colombian drug lord for $400 million.... Along the way, the satisfyingly complex storylines include (1) our not-so-innocent Burke abroad; (2) Desdemona McCoy, young, attractive, black, feisty, and a field operator [for the C.I.A.], who returns to St. Petersburg to monitor that sale; (3) Andrusha Karpov, in Italy to find Florentine ocher for Nadyezhda Petrovna, who's painted a brilliant copy of the Madonna Litta; (4) art broker Charles Hamilton Merrill, who's arranging for drug lord Rafael Santera Calderon to buy the Leonardo; and (5) Russian mafia boss Slema Chavchavadze. Before the end, things heat up between Desdemona and Burke as they and their trio of allies try to survive a lot of cruel, greedy, mean men. Cullen's latest is good enough ... that one wishes to call it a fine novel instead of an effective page-turner."—Kirkus Reviews