In a steamy colonial city, an eccentric Frenchman offers for sale an extraordinary collection of primitive art. The two anthropologists called in to appraise the pieces for the national museum quickly find themselves in a murky world where the boundaries of authenticity and deception blur in the tropical heat. What begins as an intellectual puzzle threatens to turn into a deadly confrontation. As the game of cat-and-mouse unfolds, the trail leads from the fashionable living rooms of French expatriates to the thatched huts of the Amazonian rainforest, from a Princeton seminar room to a cluttered warehouse not far from Devil's Island, from a chic Parisian cafe to the cobbled streets of northeastern Brazil. Are the objects in the collection worldclass masterpieces of primitive art? Or do they reflect the agile hand and twisted mind of a brilliant forger? Or might the ultimate enigma be of an entirely different nature? Under the equatorial sun, the anthropologists' obsessive pursuit of Truth gradually undermines their academic certainties about art and culture - and, ultimately, their vision of reality itself.
