Portrait of a Dead Model

In Moscow, girls disappear under strange circumstances. Not stars, not models, not bankers’ daughters— but shopgirls and cleaners, plain-looking, a bit heavyset, with a failed personal life. And then they are found in their own apartments, but already lifeless, with traces of strangulation by a thin cord. On each victim’s body, experts find old sketches signed in French “Ingres.” Engr is the name of the master of French neoclassicism. But how could authentic sketches for the genius painting “Turkish Baths” end up in shabby Khrushchev-era apartments on the outskirts of Moscow? After all, every draft for a great painting should be kept in the artist’s homeland—in Ingres’s museum in Montauban! The Paris prefecture checks… and discovers the substitution. The murder case of the girls grows into an international crime. The sophisticated killer plays a deadly game with detectives, where they have to piece together the puzzle step by step to understand what connects the dead girls from Russia and the French idol—the legendary painter Ingres…