Imagine if your life was spent at the mercy of coincidence...

A missing multi-million-pound painting, an insistent ex who won't take no for an answer, and a ruthless media Baron who always gets his way. What could possibly go right?

Serial life avoider and semi-professional layabout, Jim Riven, is not particularly good at anything, unless lying in bed all day, ignoring his front door and his phone, and then going down the pub every evening, could be described as a life skill. But Jim Riven did have one particular talent—or what he referred to as 'his curse'—that involved unnecessary and unwanted coincidences, or 'not so serendipitous happenchances' as he also liked to call them. Happenchances that had dogged his life ever since he could remember.

When Jim Riven's ex-girlfriend, a rather spoilt society girl and daughter of all round international media rogue, Roo Osbourne, turns up unexpectedly one morning to elicit his help in finding a stolen painting by the grandfather of modern art, Piet Mondrian, Jim Riven's life is turned upside down. And, for Jim Riven, upside down was not the right way up at all.

And so started a series of the most startling coincidences, placing him at the centre of a fascinating and complex mystery.