Breaking the law seems to agree with Peter Carey. He won a Man Booker Prize for "True History of the Kelly Gang," starring Australia's version of Robin Hood. He swiped "Great Expectations" from Pip, making the criminal "Jack Maggs" its dark new heart. "My Life as a Fake" brilliantly turned literary fraud into a tale of horror; now Carey uses art fraud to tell an uneasy love story in his new Theft. (Next up: mail fraud.)

"Theft" is the story of two brothers. Michael "Butcher" Bones, is a "previously famous artist" who's just served a stint in prison for trying to steal his own work. (It was granted to his ex-wife, "The Plaintiff," in their divorce.) He's the guardian of his mentally troubled brother, Hugh, "doughy, six foot four, filthy, dangerous-looking," who speaks in a kind of biblically poetic style that wouldn't sound out of place in Faulkner and carries a metal folding chair everywhere he goes.

Actually, "troubled" applies equally to either Bones boy: Butcher indulges in all the clichés of the artistic life - selfishness, alcoholism, rages - with foul-mouthed gusto. Of course, despite Hugh's well-placed contempt for Butcher's egotism, there are reasons behind the rage. The most compelling is his separation from his only son because of an incident that makes for the book's most chilling revelation. But by the end of the tale, readers look forward to Hugh's chapters: There's less swearing and fewer contortions of self-justification.

The Bones boys were raised by a giant, angry man - the last in a line of butchers - and the terrified woman who married him. Their mother drank from a mug that read, "In the morning, consider that you may not live until evening," and embroidered samplers with such cheerful mottoes as, "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small."

While Butcher and Hugh have very different takes on current events, they are united in one opinion: "Poor old mum, God bless her."

After setting up two impressively unreliable narrators, Carey then unfolds a tale of lost paintings, scheming, and duplicity.

As the novel opens, the brothers have camped out in rural Australia at a house owned by Butcher's patron, where Butcher is proceeding to trash the place in the name of art. One rainy day, a lovely blonde gets her car stuck, and Butcher has to help her across the flooded river. Her name is Marlene, and she's risked her Manolos in all that mud to verify a painting by modern artist Jacques Liebovitz.

Here we pause for a lesson in art history. The provenance of Liebovitz's paintings is particularly tortured, even in the realm of modern art, because on the night of his death, his second wife and her lover absconded with 50 works in progress, which they subsequently touched up to look like finished paintings.

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