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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