The face opens its eyes before he finishes painting them.
Milan, 1497. Leonardo da Vinci has spent fourteen months unable to finish the face of Judas in The Last Supper. The plaster keeps moving. The pigment dries wrong. And something on the other side of the wall is learning to use his own voice.
Then a locked wooden box arrives from Vinci, sealed thirty years ago by his grandfather Antonio, the man the family called mad. Inside: seven pots of pigment that should not exist, a half-finished portrait of a woman with the wrong smile, and a journal that explains why every keeper before him is dead.
She has been waiting in the dark far longer than he has been alive.
She has read his notebooks.
She is offering to finish his masterpiece.
A Renaissance supernatural thriller with the historical depth of Dan Brown, the literary horror of Mexican Gothic, and the slow dread of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
The prequel to THE MONA LISA CAGE, Book One of The Painted Souls.
Read this first.
