Painter of the Heavens

"A Novel of Crime and the Heart," Painter of the Heavens goes inside the mind of a woman as she is drawn into the bizarre fraud scheme of an eccentric man she is dating. Penny doesn't know going in that Lyle is a con artist. His personality had seemed slightly strange from the start, but charismatic and alluring as well. Only after bonding with him does she learn that the "business plan," which was too sensitive for him to talk about, is in fact an outrageous forgery plot. He needs an...
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"A Novel of Crime and the Heart," Painter of the Heavens goes inside the mind of a woman as she is drawn into the bizarre fraud scheme of an eccentric man she is dating. Penny doesn't know going in that Lyle is a con artist. His personality had seemed slightly strange from the start, but charismatic and alluring as well. Only after bonding with him does she learn that the "business plan," which was too sensitive for him to talk about, is in fact an outrageous forgery plot. He needs an accomplice for this caper, and sees Penny as being perfect for the role. The novel is character-driven noir fiction that goes deep into the heads of its two lovers. Penny and Lyle aren't Bonnie and Clyde, but they become desperadoes in a way, when their perfect, "victimless" crime spins out on them. A phony letter and a genuine love. Humor, pathos, danger, and two of what Dickens called "lives of quiet desperation" come together in Bart Stewart's debut novel, Painter of the Heavens.