The art forger, by B. A. Shapiro

The 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is one of the great unsolved art crimes.  This novel is an alternative history of what might have happened to one of the paintings (also fictional) involved.  Claire Roth is a talented young painter who currently works as a copyist for Repro producing skilled copies of famous paintings.  She is asked by successful gallery owner Aiden Markel to produce a copy of one of the stolen paintings.  The reward won’t by just money, which she desperately needs, but an opportunity to show her work at his important gallery.  A Faustian bargain.  But is the painting she is using as her guide a copy of the Degas, or is it the stolen original, and if so, how did Markel come by it?  There’s more to the background story of Claire and "forgery," which led to the suicide a few years earlier of her lover.  And Claire and Aiden seem to be falling in love.  The art scene is well-described; the details of how a successful forged painting is made are fascinating; the imaginary correspondence between Isabella Gardner and her niece is well-done; and the dénouement is clever.  But I was troubled by Claire’s lack of any real moral compass.  360 pp.