You would think a short order cook with unfulfilled aspirations to be a recognized pencil artist would be an easy victim for a billionaire bully. Billy Harrigan, the protagonist of THE PENCIL ARTIST, has just turned 60, he hasn’t sold a drawing in months, and his wife is disgusted with him for wasting his college education on an unfulfilled dream. She is an accomplished academic, who is having an affair with Gustave Nochsky, France’s foremost scholar on Russian folktales and myths. Billy experiences a moment of joy when Ann Stone, the wife of Theodore Stone, a billionaire investor, buys a set of his landscapes for her Hamptons beach house. Teddy, as Stone is called, is not only is extraordinarily successful, he is extraordinarily paranoid and vengeful, cranky, and old. He suspects Ann of actually cheating with Billy, or at the very least desiring him. Teddy sets out to crush and humiliate Billy, who would be helpless alone, but he isn’t. The internet sees to that.
