BA Shapiro

If you love great art, this literary thriller is for you. If you’ve tried to paint and wondered how great artists rise above the mundane, then this novel will keep you turning pages late into the night. And if you have ever gazed at a painting and longed to whip it off the wall and run away with it, then you will understand the passion that drives the plot of ‘The Art Forger’.

Claire, the struggling young artist, is eminently believable. Betrayed professionally as well as emotionally, as Claire’s situation unfolds it tugs at the heart strings. I felt I was there with her in New York, seeing the artwork, feeling the passion and frustration, sharing every sleepless night and each anguished moment.  I longed for her to find acclaim and some kind of recompense. But the Faustian pact she enters into is fraught with danger – and the kind of twists and turns that make the best of thrillers.

Based on the infamous – and unsolved – art robbery at New York’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the 1990s, the question at the heart of this novel centres on just one painting. Is it a genuine Degas? Certainly its history and provenance are watertight – and if Claire copies it with intent to defraud, that makes her a criminal…  Read on!