Seattle photo dealer and art historian Robert Armour believes his past bad luck is about to change when he stumbles upon long-lost glass negatives, the work of the great Chinese-American landscape photographer Wilfred Eng. These plates - nudes of a beautiful young woman dating back to 1874 - bring certainty to the rumor of an affair between Eng and Ellen McFarland, the wife of his wealthy white patron.The Eng negatives have the potential to restore both his reputation and his bank account, but a single misstep could shatter his fragile standing and the new-found peace and comfort of his personal life.The temptation proves too great and Armour begins looking for a way to cash in on his discovery. For help he enlists an old acquaintance named Parker Lange, an art hustler who "could not only sell you land in Florida, but convince you that the swamp gasses rising from it were friendly UFOs." Armour and Parker, along with Parker's cohorts, the twins Meagan and Christiana, hatch a plan to pry the plates from the hands of Judith Lund, a wealthy, frustrated artist and, so everyone believes, the plates' rightful owner. At the same time, Armour just as obsessively pieces together Wilfred Eng's difficult and troubled life, and as the lies and deceit mount up in his own life, he begins to feel an unwanted kinship with the hapless Eng. Read Less