Alexandra Andrews’s second novel, The Fine Art of Lying (2026), is a psychological thriller set in the rarified worlds of New York City’s hedge funds and high-stakes art market. Following her critically acclaimed debut, Who Is Maud Dixon? (2021), Andrews returns to the suspense genre with the story of Clare Bast, an unfulfilled art history scholar and stay-at-home mother. Feeling alienated from her affluent life, Clare begins a passionate affair with Gabriel Prévost, a charismatic art dealer, which reignites her sense of self but draws her into a dangerous conspiracy involving a secretly deaccessioned painting, her husband’s powerful employers, and ultimately, murder. The novel uses its suspenseful plot to explore themes of Commodification Corrupts Fine Art, Wealth Shields Criminality, and Motherhood Triggers a Crisis of Identity.

This guide is based on the 2026 HarperCollins first edition of the novel.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of graphic violence, death, sexual content, substance use, cursing, and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Clare Bast is a stalled art history PhD candidate and unfulfilled stay-at-home mother. She finds her affluent but stifling life upended when she meets Gabriel Prévost, a charismatic French art dealer, at a party thrown by her husband Jed’s boss, Alec Wolfe. Jed has recently become general counsel for Alec’s hedge fund, Gatepost. Feeling an instant connection over their shared artistic sensibilities, Clare accepts Gabriel’s invitation to visit his gallery. The visit is orchestrated by Alec’s wife, Tasha, who claims she wants to help Clare resume her career.

At the gallery, Gabriel reveals he is temporarily in possession of Longfin, a painting by Blake Webley, the subject of Clare’s dissertation. The painting has been secretly deaccessioned, or sold from the collection, of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Intrigued, Clare agrees to see it at Gabriel’s home. The encounter quickly becomes sexual, igniting a passionate affair that makes Clare feel alive for the first time in years. To conceal her frequent trips downtown, she tells Jed she has accepted a part-time consulting job with Gabriel, a lie that becomes an important cover story after she has a near-miss encounter with Jed’s sister, Lauren.

The affair grows complicated as Clare’s two worlds begin to collide. After she is late picking up her daughter, Sadie, from school, Jed’s domineering mother, Dorothy Bast, intervenes, shaming Clare and making veiled comments about her fitness as a parent. The tension escalates at a MoCA gala where Jed meets Gabriel, and Jed’s suspicions are aroused by the dealer’s probing questions. Later, at Dorothy’s birthday dinner, the family facade cracks when Jed’s father, Abe, reveals that Jed was passed over for partnership at his old law firm, a fact he had hidden from Clare.

Following this humiliation, Dorothy confronts Clare privately, revealing she knows about the affair and threatening to use Clare’s infidelity and recent maternal failings to gain full custody of Sadie in a divorce. Shaken, Clare resolves to end things with Gabriel, but he breaks up with her first, claiming he is trying to protect her and her family. Two weeks later, against her better judgment, Clare attends an opening at Gabriel’s gallery with old friends. The spark between them reignites instantly, and they leave the party together for his house.

At Gabriel’s home, as they begin to undress in his bedroom, they hear an intruder downstairs. Gabriel grabs a heavy statue and goes to investigate. Terrified, Clare hides under the bed after hearing a scuffle. A man wearing black Reebok sneakers enters the bedroom, takes the Longfin painting from the wall, and leaves. When Clare emerges, she discovers Gabriel’s dead body at the foot of the stairs, a gunshot wound in his chest. Panicked at the thought of her daughter, she decides against calling 911. Instead, she meticulously wipes down her fingerprints, flees the scene, and returns home, resolving to say nothing.

The police, led by Detectives Pam Breznick and Greg Nguyen, soon question her. Aware of the affair from Gabriel’s ex-wife, they are suspicious of both Clare and Jed, who acts overly defensive. The detectives reveal text messages in which Gabriel repeatedly urged Clare to leave Jed, solidifying their theory of a revenge killing by a jealous husband. Desperate to deflect suspicion from Jed, Clare tells them about the stolen Longfin. However, this only increases their suspicion of her, as she is a Webley expert with a documented interest in the painting. Her situation worsens when a mysterious $50,000 is wired into her account from a Cyprus-based shell company, Kallsten Holdings.

Convinced she is being framed, Clare confronts Jed, who reveals a sprawling conspiracy. Gatepost’s primary investor is Axion, a shell company for Viktor Semenov, a sanctioned Russian oligarch who is Tasha Wolfe’s godfather. When Jed discovered this and threatened to report it, Tasha blackmailed him into silence. She had orchestrated Clare’s entire relationship with Gabriel—who was already Axion’s art dealer—to create a false trail implicating Clare in the sanctions violations, giving Tasha leverage over Jed. However, Jed lies about how he came to possess the stolen painting, claiming Gabriel sent it to him before he died. Knowing this is impossible, Clare fears Jed is the killer.

After police find Jed’s fingerprints at the scene—from an earlier, heated confrontation with Gabriel over Tasha’s scheme—he is arrested. Clare then travels to the Basts’ Hamptons house and finds the real Longfin hidden in a closet. When confronted, Jed admits he lied out of panic but insists the painting was delivered to him by a messenger two days before Gabriel’s death, a fact the doorman’s logbook confirms.

This revelation proves there were two Longfin paintings. Clare deduces Gabriel, forced by Tasha into an insurance fraud scheme to get the painting to Viktor, had a forgery made by the artist Tony Fang. Gabriel planned to let the fake be “stolen” while sending the real one to Jed for safekeeping as a final act of defiance against Tasha. Clare realizes Tasha’s bodyguard, Emil, was the man in the Reeboks, having been sent to perform a simple theft and panicked when Gabriel unexpectedly confronted him.

With all evidence pointing to Jed, Clare devises a plan. She takes the real Longfin and plants it in a shed on the Wolfes’ Southampton property, then anonymously tips off Elise Vargas, a private art investigator hired by Gabriel’s estate. The discovery of the stolen painting on Wolfe property forces the police to reopen the case. They obtain a search warrant, find Emil’s sneakers matching a bloody footprint from the scene, and Emil confesses, implicating Tasha in exchange for a plea deal.

A year later, Tasha is found guilty of manslaughter and theft. The charges against Jed are dropped, but he is disbarred for his role in the Gatepost cover-up. He and Clare are separated; he lives with his parents while she and Sadie have moved to a new apartment. The real Longfin, donated by Gabriel’s estate, is now on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum.

Clare now works for Elise’s art intelligence firm, satisfied by her active professional life for the first time. She has quietly begun compiling files on Alec Wolfe and Viktor Semenov, ready to ensure they are held accountable for their roles. Having survived a catastrophe that started with a simple lie, Clare has learned from Tasha’s ruthlessness and is now prepared to shape her own fate rather than be a victim of it.