Chaz Wilmot is a talented artist who prefers creating quirky magazine illustrations, using the techniques of the Old Masters, over working for gallery owners in the cutthroat New York art world.

Chaz is not a forger, as he explains to anyone who will listen to him. Instead, he prefers to think of himself as an original artist who creates work using old techniques. His talent is extraordinary. In fact, his second wife left him because she hated to see him waste his gifts on editorial work. Chaz coasts as an artist and entertains himself with recreational drug use until he takes part in a drug study engineered by an old college buddy aimed at uncovering the roots of creativity. The drug starts Chaz on a path of waking dreams — at times he imagines himself as both a successful New York artist and as a European painter working in another time. When he questions the drug’s effects, he is warned they are unknown, but he continues the trial since he paints with greater creativity than ever before while under the influence of the mysterious drug.

When his latest commission for Vanity Fair magazine, a series of portraits of famous living actresses painted in the styles of Old Masters, is cancelled, one of the paintings attracts the attention of a mysterious European collector. Desperate for money and eager to escape complicated family problems in the United States, Chaz agrees to go to Venice to restore an old fresco “in the style of the original artist.”

Armed with his determination to restore the work in Venice and to finally make some real money, Chaz flees to Europe. One unintended side-effect of the drug experiment, however, keeps cropping up — Chaz is experiencing hallucinations so strong he thinks he is the 17th century Spanish painter Diego Velazquez.

The Forgery of Venus is a big novel filled with eccentric artists, mysterious villains and historical details about the great artists of Europe. Chaz is a fish out of water in the contemporary art world, and Gruber does a great job of portraying the frustration of an artist who wants to paint using traditional methods, but who is constantly blocked by the fickle demands of the contemporary art scene.

As more characters are drawn into Chaz’s crazy life and his hallucinations become more frequent, his art goes from strength to strength, attracting the attention of ever more nefarious characters — both in the 21st and the 17th centuries. The story occasionally slows due to ruminations on the mysterious nature of creativity, but Gruber packs enough adventure into the rest of The Forgery of Venus to make it an absorbing mystery.