The Fine Art of Lying

The novel opens with a prologue in which Clare Bast stands naked over a dead body, blood pooling at her feet. Her mind retreats into art-historical minutiae, identifying the blood's color as Venetian red. She considers calling 911 but hesitates, thinking of her husband and daughter asleep at home.

Two months earlier, Clare hides in a closet at her in-laws' East Hampton summer home with her nearly four-year-old daughter, Sadie. Clare's husband, Jed, reveals he has secretly bought Sadie a white rabbit for her birthday. The scene introduces the Bast family: Dorothy, Jed's controlling, old-money mother; Abe, his retired-lawyer father; and Lauren, his younger sister. Clare, who grew up in modest circumstances in Binghamton, New York, remains an outsider in this world.

In Manhattan, Clare attends an anniversary party thrown by Alec and Tasha Wolfe, who co-own a hedge fund called Gatepost where Jed recently became general counsel. While examining the Wolfes' art collection, Clare meets Gabriel Prévost, a French-born art dealer, and they share a lively conversation. Clare feels an unfamiliar surge of desire before abruptly excusing herself. Tasha later reveals she had hoped to introduce them, reminding Clare of favors she has arranged, including a meeting with the Museum of Contemporary Art's (MoCA) chief curator, Clement Rosier, and a phone call with Tasha's godfather Viktor, a Russian art collector.

Clare's backstory emerges through her daily routines. As a teenager, she discovered that certain paintings produced an almost transcendent response she calls an internal "hum." She worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, married Jed, and enrolled in a PhD program at Columbia studying the painter Blake Webley. After Sadie's difficult birth and five weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), Clare abandoned her dissertation. Her mother's sudden death compounded her grief. On a later visit to the Met, she realized the hum was gone.

When Tasha takes Clare to Gabriel's gallery, Clare and Gabriel reconnect. He reveals he has a Webley painting called Longfin (1958) at his house, purchased from MoCA for an anonymous client. At his brownstone, Clare touches the painting and is overcome. They have sex on his couch. Clare feels alive for the first time in years.

Clare begins a double life, visiting Gabriel while Sadie is at school and telling Jed she has taken a consulting job with the dealer. Gabriel periodically texts "Leave your husband," a running joke that carries genuine feeling. But the affair erodes her careful arrangements. She is late picking up Sadie, and Dorothy collects her granddaughter. At Dorothy's birthday dinner, her mother-in-law reveals she has consulted a family court judge about how adultery affects custody and threatens that if Clare does not end the affair, she will ensure Clare loses Sadie. Clare refuses to comply.

Gabriel ends the relationship, citing concern for Clare. She tries to recommit to her marriage but cannot suppress what the affair awakened. Weeks later, at an opening at Gabriel's gallery, Prévost-Kline, they reconnect and leave together for his house.

While they are in the bedroom, someone breaks in downstairs. Gabriel grabs a bronze sculpture and goes to investigate. Clare hides under the bed, sees a pair of black Reebok sneakers enter the room, and watches the intruder remove Longfin from the wall. She finds Gabriel at the foot of the stairs, shot and dead. Seeing Sadie's photo on her phone, Clare decides not to call 911. She wipes down surfaces and leaves.

Detectives Pam Breznick and Greg Nguyen question Clare. She admits the affair but claims she went straight home the night Gabriel died. Breznick warns that the evidence points to a personal crime: no forced entry, no stolen valuables. When the detectives later shift suspicion to Jed as a jealous husband, Clare tells them about Longfin, but Breznick dismisses her. Meanwhile, fifty thousand dollars from a Cypriot shell company called Kallsten Holdings appears in Clare's bank account, suggesting someone is framing her.

Elise Vargas, a private art-and-antiquities investigator hired by the executor of Gabriel's estate, approaches Clare and proposes they trade information. Elise reveals no record of a buyer for Longfin exists in Gabriel's files. Through Gabriel's assistant, Clare connects Peter DeGroot, a front man listed as Kallsten's director, to another shell company called Axion, which was Gabriel's client.

While Jed sleeps, Clare searches his phone and discovers Axion is Gatepost's largest investor. Shortly after, Jed is arrested for first-degree manslaughter. Dorothy takes control of his legal defense and blocks Clare from seeing him. Recalling that Jed recently made an unexplained trip to East Hampton and that the spare closet was his childhood hiding spot, Clare drives to the summer house and finds Longfin hidden behind a pile of sweaters.

Clare confronts Jed, who reveals the full picture. Axion is owned by Viktor Semenov, Tasha's godfather, a Russian oligarch sanctioned by the United States after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gatepost's continued relationship with Viktor constitutes fraud. When Jed discovered this, Tasha threatened to expose Clare's connection to Axion's art purchases, and Jed capitulated. He claims Longfin was delivered to their building before Gabriel's death, but Clare knows this is impossible since she saw the painting on Gabriel's wall the night he was killed.

Through Gabriel's email records, Clare discovers Tasha orchestrated everything: She introduced Gabriel to Peter DeGroot, tipped him off about MoCA's potential deaccessioning of Longfin (the sale of a work from a museum's permanent collection), and asked him to hire Clare as a favor. Tasha steered Clement into proposing the sale by dangling the museum directorship as incentive. Clare also visits Tony Fang, a painter known for copying old masters, and finds studies of Longfin in his studio, confirming Gabriel had the painting copied.

The full scheme becomes clear. Gabriel agreed to Tasha's plan to have Longfin "stolen" and sent to Viktor, allowing Gabriel to file an eighteen-million-dollar insurance claim. But Gabriel secretly sent the real painting to Jed, knowing Jed could not report it without exposing Gatepost's fraud, and hung the forgery on his wall. Tasha sent Emil, the Wolfes' live-in bodyguard, to steal the painting on a night Gabriel was supposed to be at his gallery. Gabriel came home unexpectedly because Clare had lured him away, and Emil shot him in a panic. When Clare visits Tasha, she spots Emil's black Reeboks and recognizes them from the night of the murder.

On Thanksgiving Day, Clare retrieves Longfin, drives to Southampton, and plants it in the Wolfes' garden shed. She tips off Elise, who reports the discovery to the police. When Tasha intercepts Clare and attempts to recruit her into a story blaming Alec and Jed, Clare refuses and bluffs that Viktor knows his painting is a fake, turning Tasha's most powerful ally against her.

In the epilogue, set one year later, Clare and Jed have divorced. She lives with Sadie in South Harlem and works for Elise's firm. Longfin belongs to the Metropolitan Museum, donated by Gabriel's ex-wife, Beatriz Barros. Tasha has been found guilty of theft and manslaughter after Emil testified against her in a plea deal and faces up to 25 years in prison. Walking Sadie to school through Central Park, Clare reflects that she is done waiting for fate to intervene and will shape her own circumstances with her eyes open.