A tornado has visited Goldfield, destroying most of the small Midwestern town and, in particular, the farm buildings of an old reclusive artist. As search and rescue teams, along with a French art expert who appears shortly after the tornado, investigate the buildings, they find his body stuffed in a freezer. Mayor Ryan Lambert and his young workers learn from a local reporter that the old guy was the last and perhaps the greatest artist of German Expressionism, a movement that was eradicated by the Nazis in the 1930s. As the man's murder is investigated, four more bodies are uncovered at the site - models, students - each one killed in a different way. After the art recovered from the nearly destroyed artist studio is deemed original and invaluable by the first expert, a second French art expert arrives and claims the entire body of work to be forgeries. A missing Russian nurse, a gallery in Moscow, a man in drag, a top-of-the-line Mercedes, and a spate of duplicate original paintings lead to a violent confrontation amid mountains of canvases, easels, and frames in an abandoned airplane hangar...