The Art Forger - B.A. Shapiro

This book had some issues, but all in all, it was kind of a fun look at art forgery and the world of struggling artists. Claire Roth is down on her luck. She's an artist, but some (slowly revealed) drama from her past has kept her from making it big in the cutthroat art world. She now divides her time between painting for herself, teaching an art class at a boys juvenile detention center, and copying masterworks for a company called Re-Pro, who then sells the oil painted copies for thousands of dollars. 

Enter Aiden Markel, the owner of an art gallery in Boston called Markel G. He has a proposition for Claire, he wants her to copy Edgar Degas' After the Bath V (there is no After the Bath V - it was created solely for the purpose of this novel) which was stolen in the infamous art heist from the Isabella Gardner Museum in the 1990s. During the heist, thieves dressed as cops stole 13 priceless works from the Museum, including Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. None of the paintings have ever been recovered. 

Having recently finished (and loved with every fiber of my reading body) The Goldfinch, I was prime for more art thievery. So Markel tells Claire that once the painting is copied, Aiden will sell the copy to an unsuspecting buyer who believes he's buying the real thing, and then will return the original to the museum. He also promises Claire he will give her a one-woman show at his gallery, and will pay her $50,000. Being desperately poor, Claire agrees. 

However, once she begins to study the painting, Claire begins to suspect that it's not a Degas at all - that the painting is a copy of the original. In the meantime, Claire and Aiden begin sleeping together and then... well... these two are the worst criminal masterminds every, so naturally their story begins to unravel.

I'm not sure if the audio narrator just ruined Claire for me, but there were so many things I didn't like about Claire. First of all, everything she says is so dramatic and breathy (okay could be a narrator issue). Second, she's kind of an idiot. Her big secret from the past, is that when her more famous professor/boyfriend gets artist's block, she paints something for him to get him over his hump and then he enters it into a competition, which he wins. He receives fame and fortune based on the painting and breaks up with Claire. She's so distraught because of the "fraud" (hmmm suspect), that she urges him to come clean. When he doesn't, she tells the museum curator that she painted the famous painting. She's not believed, and then she's blackballed from the art world. 

So here, she's being asked to partake in a criminal conspiracy and inevitably she what? - Yeah she thinks everything is going to be okay by coming clean. Like I said, she's kind of dumb. And you know what? She is guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud, but somehow she doesn't see it that way. She thinks she can outsmart Museum directors, FBI agents and the press. I don't think it really works that way. Also, the "love" between Claire and Aiden I wasn't really buying either. I mean, I was okay with their sleeping together and what not, but Claire mentions several times she knows nothing about Aiden. I wasn't ready to jump on the "but then I fell in love with you" bandwagon. Lastly, there are these letters from Isabella Stewart Gardner to her niece Amelia which are meant to give the reader some added insight (you'll get the punchline of the book FAR FAR before Claire - remember she's a sweet dumb dumb), but they come off overly flowery and over the top. 

Anyway, this gets three stars because I was entertained, but there were some points where I had to shut off the recording and forget how much I was annoyed by Claire before turning it back on. The best parts were the sections about historical forgers and how technically art forgery is done.

3/5 stars.