This is a novel of the art world: equal parts love, ambition, and betrayal. Weland Tilyard used to say he had given the gift of sex to the heartland: paintings whose erotic charge was subdued to such beauty and warmth that it became a kind of innocence. It made him famous. But when he cranked into motion the whole elaborate machinery of public attention, Bea Holliman had been carried along as well, transformed into a figure of such beauty and erotic...