The Secret of the Alchemist

In this young adult novel, Gerald de Havilland steals a 16th-century painting from his estranged wife's family in Geneva then decides to doublecross his client in the hope of making a larger profit. Instead he lands himself, his daughter Helen, and Jake, her chance acquaintance, in a sinister tangle of events as they are pursued across Europe by the client, the occultist Aurelian Pounce, who is bent on recovering the painting and solving its secret—nothing less than the whereabouts of the Philosopher's Stone, the object of alchemy's highest quest.