Nathan is a young artist traveling across Europe in search of the emotional fire that has been missing from his work, He's been deemed by his mentors and critics as technically skillful but uninspired--criticisms he fears to be true. On a Paris street, he witnesses the volatile breakup of a young French woman and her beau. Nathan pursues a meeting with her and it quickly becomes evident that her provocative charisma and scathing beauty may conjure the electricity he has been seeking for his work. So when the woman invites him to her parents' crumbling, centuries-old cheteau in the country to allow him to sketch her, he accepts, knowing that this proposition is both ill advised and thrilling. Once enveloped by this isolated estate, a door opens to a world Nathan is not prepared for. The arrival of the young woman's family--her mother, a volatile, voracious former ballerina, her father, a mysterious diplomat with secrets of his own, and her uncle, who just might be trafficking in art forgeries--triggers a series of dire events. Soon Nathan is caught in a web of sexual treachery, family secrets, betrayal and crime.