Published in 2012
386 pages
B.A. Shapiro (Barbara Shapiro) is the author of six novels — The Art Forger, The Safe Room, Blind Spot, See No Evil, Blameless, and Shattered Echoes — as well as four screenplays (Blind Spot, The Lost Coven, Borderline, and Shattered Echoes) and the nonfiction work The Big Squeeze.
Before turning to fiction full-time, Shapiro directed research projects for a residential substance abuse facility, worked as a systems analyst and statistician, headed the Boston office of a software development firm, and served as an adjunct professor teaching sociology at Tufts University and creative writing at Northeastern University.
Her writing career began after the birth of her second child, when she left a high-pressure corporate position and, inspired by her mother’s question — “If you had one year to live, how would you want to spend it?” — chose to write her first novel and spend more time with her children.
Now based in Boston, Shapiro lives with her husband, Dan, and their dog, Sagan. She is currently at work on her next novel, though she has no plans to raise more children.
What is this book about?
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.
