From the publisher's blurb:
Back in Renaissance Italy a rather stupid Goblin posed for Leonardo Da Vinci. The astute Italian created a statuette of the goblin and cast it in Bronze. At this point the Inquisition (a forerunner of The Agency) stepped in and confiscated it.
Fast forward six hundred years and the statuette, the notorious Maltese Goblin, has gone through a dozen owners bringing terrible fortune to each and has it just been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Social History and Art in New York. It is to be put on display tomorrow for the first time in its long and troubled history.