Barbara Shapiro, a New York Times bestselling author who has written several historical thrillers set in the art world and based on true events, will return to the South End Writes program via ZOOM on Tuesday, May 26, 6:30 PM, with her most recent work of fictionalized sleuthing, The Collector’s Apprentice. (Details of the ZOOM meeting are at the bottom of the page. )

Also known as B.A. Shapiro, the part-time South End resident has written seven novels,  including  The Muralist and The Art Forger. The latter novel of suspense, about the unsolved 1990 art theft of irreplaceable works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, won the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Boston Authors Society Award for Fiction.

The Collector's Apprentice is inspired by the controversial story of Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation art collection, which the author crafted into a thriller that plays out in Paris and Philadelphia in the 1920s. It’s a tale about the lengths to which people will go for their obsession, whether art, money, love, or vengeance:  Nineteen-year-old Paulien Mertens finds herself in Paris—broke, disowned, and alone. In her native Belgium everyone, including her own family, believes she stole millions in a sophisticated con game perpetrated by her then-fiancé, George Everard. She creates a new identity, a Frenchwoman named Vivienne Gregsby, and sets out to recover her father’s art collection, prove her innocence—and exact revenge on George. She becomes the assistant to an eccentric American art collector, Edwin Bradley and helps him build an art museum near Philadelphia. Caught up in the Parisian world of post-Impressionists and expatriates—including Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse, with whom Vivienne becomes romantically entwined, she is eventually arrested for the alleged murder of Bradley. Tantalizing scenes from the trial are cleverly placed throughout the narrative.

Suspense writer, Barbara Shapiro, featured at the South End Writes program in 2013, signing copies of The Art Forger.

Several years ago, Shapiro talked about The Art Forger before a standing-room-only crowd at the South End library. The author recounted how she became intimately familiar with every aspect of the tragic art theft as she transformed the particulars of the case into crime fiction. When she was asked what she thought had happened to the artworks, she said she had come to believe they had been destroyed.

Her earlier suspense novels include The Safe Room, Blind Spot, See No Evil, Blameless and Shattered Echoes. The novelist also wrote four screenplays, Blind Spot, The Lost Coven, Borderline and Shattered Echoes.

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