Provenance - an art-heist thriller

Written on and off over a few years, my debut novel straddles the murky worlds of looted art, pro cycling and money laundering. Think William Boyd’s Gabriel’s Moon meets Michael Frayn’s Headlong during a stroll along Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road and via a sports scandal that makes Lance Armstrong look like a cherub.

One oligarch. His art world provocateur nemesis. A secretive cycling team. A sham Picasso. And a hapless journalist caught in the middle…

Miles Calvert, a freelance journalist in freefall, is among the suspects when a Parisian auction house is broken into on the night the Tour de France comes to town. Nothing is stolen; instead, an exact duplicate of Picasso’s Les Minotaures de la Route is left alongside the original. This questions the long-lost painting’s authenticity and heaps pressure on its Russian owner, the manager of the cycling team whose star rider has just won the Tour by foul means.

To prove his innocence of both crimes, Calvert agrees to infiltrate Denis Rokotov’s inner circle. Capturing the zeitgeist of London in the late 90s and early 2000s, PROVENANCE blends suspense and humour as we learn the truth behind the origins of both painting and rider through a series of flashbacks from Cyprus all the way to the Arctic Circle. A high-stakes denouement plays out in Turkmenistan, the notoriously closed-off former Soviet state which I visited in my capacity as a journalist.

The inspiration for PROVENANCE came from a series of interviews I conducted with a former art-looting kingpin before I started reporting on cycling, a sport whose skullduggery is untapped ground for a crime thriller.

Following in the tire-tracks of my non-fiction debut Climbs and Punishment, PROVENANCE is my latest attempt to fulfil my destiny of becoming what my mother-in-law describes as ‘the Dick Francis of cycling’. Now all I need is an internationally renowned agent with a proven track record of nurturing unknown and unpublished authors…