Painted in Blood

'The Sleeping Nymph': a work of art of magnetic beauty, painted by a young partisan fighter during the last days of the Second World War. A painting carrying a shocking secret hidden in the red pigment on the canvas, made with the blood of a human heart. But whose heart? There is no body, no confession. Only that faint trace of blood. And that's what leads commissioner Teresa Battaglia to the Resia Valley, in the north eastern part of Italy: a perfect genetic enclave protected for centuries. The valley and the portrait are the only clues to a murder that occurred more than 70 years before. A thread leading to someone hell-bent on protecting a sacred secret.