The Art Forger / B.A. Shapiro

The brazen theft of a number of masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 is the factual context for this complex yet enjoyable thriller.

Claire Roth is a talented artist who has had a checkered history that has more or less blackballed her in the art world, closing doors to competitions and gallery exhibitions, and stalling her career. She makes ends meet by recreating copies of masterpieces for an internet firm called Reproduction.com.

A Faustian bargain with a Back Bay gallery owner capitalizes on Claire’s talents as a forger to copy a stolen masterpiece from the Gardner museum—her task is to recreate a Degas from one of the paintings taken in 1990—or is it even an original Degas? Her talents as both an artist and a researcher are undisputed and when her forged copy is accepted as the recovered original, things start to get really interesting.

I would never have thought that this book on art forgery would be the page-turner it was! I liked the setting, the description of the process of recreating a masterpiece, the research Claire does, the history of Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the clever way the author tied all the loose ends together, and not necessarily the way I expected. Even though many of the facts are rather loosely based on reality, it is a novel after all, and an enjoyable one at that!

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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