Marco Antonio Correggere, an elite painting forger with a photographic memory, visits the newly opened Elizabeth Ellington Museum with Elena, his 91 year-old grandmother. When Elena sees a renaissance painting entitled The Madonna, she suffers a breakdown and claims it was stolen from her father nearly one hundred years ago. Marco doesn't believe her, nor can he afford to. An official investigation could jeopardize his cover. The people Marco works for wouldn't like that; there would be hell to pay, and Marco knows that he'd do the paying. But unable to ignore Elena's story, he ends up a criminal investigating a crime, and traces the painting's shaded provenance only to find more than he bargained for. Consumed by his family's tainted history and an obsession for a woman who died sixty years before he was born, Marco unravels the tangled threads of past and present, and exposes the horrifying truth. When Marco asks himself: How do I punish the dead?, his answer will be devastating.