num_pages: 234
description: He is a man with a hidden, complicated past--some of it perhaps unspeakably violent, much of it spent in thrall to an almost slavish fascination with seventeenth-century Flemish art. Now he is lured, unknowingly, into a scheme to authenticate a set of suspect paintings, and--as if in payment for his work, as if from the paintings themselves--a mysterious woman emerges into his life an merges with it. She seems to him to come alive only under his gaze. The mix of detachment and passion that fuels her reminds him of, and then gradually tips into, his own darker impulses. And as their affair grows more dangerous and compulsive, he begins to sense that it is being mirrored, perhaps even prefigured, in the paintings themselves. Yet nothing forewarns him of the moment when the forgery scheme will be brought to light and its unexpected, crushing ramifications abruptly revealed.
language: English
title: Athena
titlecomplete: Athena
genres: Fiction, Ireland, Crime, British Literature, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Irish Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 586
places: Ireland, Dominican Republic
series: Frames: The Freddie Montgomery Trilogy
publisher: Knopf