Sir Henry Fortune, celebrity curator, has vanished. So too has his partner in love and money, disreputable art dealer Jason Pringle. Panic spreads throughout the London art world when more people go missing. No one can locate Anastasia Holliday, sensational Abject artist; Jake Thorogood, the critic who catapulted her into stardom; or Dr. Hortense Wilde, notorious for having influenced generations of art students to despise craftsmanship.

Hysteria hits the media when it is found that the common link between the victims is that their careers blossomed when they embraced newly fashionable conceptual art. Could it be that they are hostages? If so, why? Ransom? Revenge?

Who will be next? Will it be Sir Nicholas Serota, mighty overlord of British temples of the avant-garde, or the internationally renowned young British artist Damien Hirst, whose dross became platinum? Is danger in store for Charles Saatchi, megarich husband of a TV cook and the genius who took talentless young people and turned them into a winning brand?

When news comes of a disappearance in New York, the fears of the art establishment go transatlantic, with even such stars as Jeff Koons at risk.

Next the friends of Lady (Jack) Troutbeck report her missing, too, she a standard-bearer of conservative values in education and art who recently described admirers of conceptual art as knaves and fools. The police are bewildered. And then begin the horrifying Hommage murders, lethal satires on notorious works of art.

Can Troutbeck’s friends rescue her before her worst fantasies become reality?

Ruth Dudley Edwards, a historian, novelist, biographer, and journalist, has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Gold Dagger Award, and the National University of Ireland Prize. Her novel Corridors of Death was named a 1982 New York Times Notable Book.