A museum exhibit celebrating the art of killing turns deadly in this "fiendishly clever pitch-black comedy" skewering the contemporary Italian art world (The Australian).

Morris Duckworth has a dark past. Having married and murdered his way into a wealthy Italian family, he has become a respected member of Veronese business life. But it's not enough.

Never satisfied with being anything short of the best, Duckworth plans to put on the most exciting art exhibition of the decade, based on a subject close to his heart: killing. All the great slaughters of scripture and classical times will be on show, from Cain and Abel to Brutus and Caesar. But as Duckworth meets resistance from the director of Verona's Castelvecchio Museum, everything starts to unravel. His children are rebelling, his mistress is asking for more than he wants to give, his wife is increasingly attached to her aging confessor, and, worst of all, it's getting harder to ignore the ghosts that swirl around. The shame of it is that Duckworth really did not want to have to kill again.

Tim Parks's acclaimed Duckworth trilogy has been thirty years in the making. In Painting Death, he brings it and his serial-killer alter ego to a very fitting—and very funny—end.

"Duckworth is a worthy heir to a tradition of seductive, cultured literary monsters that include Humbert Humbert and Hannibal Lecter." —The Sunday Times

"Neatly written, full of calamitous moments in which the comedy is suddenly elbowed aside by genuine emotion." —Spectator

"Colorful, often amusing . . . Parks uses the museum intrigue to draw, as he has done in his more serious efforts, a vivid, impressionistic portrait of contemporary Italy." —The New York Times