The Russian Boy — Neil Plakcy

A famous, erotically charged painting called The Russian Boy depicts a nude Russian noble named Alexei Dubernin, younger lover of painter Fyodor Luschenko. Their affair takes place in the elegance of a lost world, the Russian enclave on the Cote d'Azur in the years just before the revolution of 1917. The painting, owned by the New York Museum of Fine Arts, is stolen from a restorer's studio in Paris, bringing together three very different men, each of whom must risk his life to return this precious work of art and earn the love he deserves. Fifty-year-old Rowan McNair was a college art history professor until he lost his marriage, his family and his job after an affair with a young male former student. Now he struggles to make a new life in New York as a journalist and art theft consultant. Taylor Griffin is finishing his first year on a painting fellowship at the Institute des Artistes in Montmartre, sharing a tiny studio apartment with his Russian émigré boyfriend, Dmitri Baranov, a fellow student. When Dmitri steals The Russian Boy, he plunges himself, Taylor, and eventually Rowan into a dangerous world of drugs, sex and intrigue. The Russian Boy is a sexy, romantic story about older men involved with younger men, about art and love and the risks we take when we fall in love.