Frustrated by country life and eager for adventure and excitement, eighteen-year-old Tom Button moves to the city to study. Once there, and living in a run-down apartment block called Cairo, he is befriended by an eccentric musician Max Cheever, his beautiful wife Sally, and their close-knit circle of painters and poets.
As Tom falls increasingly under the sway of his new charismatic older friends, he enters a bohemian world of parties and gallery openings, but also of more sinister events involving murder, deception and betrayal, not to mention one of the greatest unsolved art heists of the twentieth century: the infamous theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman.
