In the 1630s, a grief-stricken Dutch painter named Sara de Vos paints an arresting scene, At the Edge of a Wood, depicting a young woman gazing on a frozen river. In the 1950s, the painting hangs over the bed in Marty de Groot’s Manhattan home. Marty fears that it may be cursed, as terrible afflictions have plagued his family since its purchase three centuries ago. But when the painting is stolen and replaced by a forgery, de Groot goes to great lengths to find and seduce the forger, a brilliant but troubled art history student named Ellie. Dominic Smith believably conjures the world of midcentury Manhattan, with its cocktail parties, Beatniks, and Bach sonatas, and the cold, competitive, genius-haunted world of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. But the real magic of this book lies in his methodical depiction of Ellie’s artistic process, and in the surprising act of redemption that saves a woman on the brink of losing everything.