Algonquin Books</br></br>Product Description</br></br>Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum?still the largest unsolved art theft in history?one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work?? she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece?the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years?may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing?and not seeing?the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.</br></br>Amazon.com Review</br></br><div class="plus">    <p>     Guest Essay by B.A. Shapiro?? Author of <i>The Art Forger</i></p>          <div class="ightImage" style="width: 200px;"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/17/d9/3e0d027590770ad8986c08.L._V147588826_SX200_.jpg" alt="Beth Orsoff" width="225" height="300" /></div>      <p>I'm a cowardly writer. Some writers sit down and begin a novel without knowing where it will end?? trusting the process to bring their story to a satisfying conclusion. But not me. I don't have the courage to begin a book until I know there's an end--and a middle too. I need an outline that allows me to believe my idea might be transformed into a successful novel. Some writers need a working title; I need a working plot. Which is why it takes me so damn long to get from that first glimmer of an idea to a complete manuscript.</p>  <p><i>The Art Forger</i> was no different. The first time I encountered art collector and museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1983?? I fell in love. I wanted to hang out with her?? walk lions down Boston streets with her?? buy famous paintings?? and do all kinds of outrageous things that would scandalize the stuffed shirts around us. But?? alas?? she died in 1924. I dismissed the idea of a "novel because she intimidated me--see more cowardice--but I never forgot her.</p>  <p>Then in 1990 she burst on the scene or at least her namesake Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum did when two men dressed as police officers bound and gagged two guards and stole thirteen pieces of art including Rembrandt's <i>Storm on the Sea of Galilee</i> Vermeer's <i>The Concert</i> and works by Degas and Manet from the collection. Now I thought now I might just be able to make it work.</p>  <p>But despite the media taking the theft international suspects who ran the gamut from the Mafia to the Vatican and the lack of any arrests I just couldn't find my story. What could Belle possibly have to do with a heist seventy years after her death? How could I write a book about a robbery that hadn't been solved? What if it was solved before I was finished--or worse just after I'd completed it--and the real solution was nothing like mine? Cowardly writer that I am I put the idea back in the drawer.</p>  <p>Nineteen years later the mystery of the Gardner heist still hadn't been solved?? and Belle was still haunting me