I’ve said before that the conversations at The Poisoned Pen are seldom about the book. B.A. Shapiro recently appeared there, and quite a bit of her conversation with Barbara Peters, owner of the bookstore, was about art. Shapiro’s latest book is The Collector’s Apprentice. Copies of her books, including signed copies of The Collector’s Apprentice, are available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2ZLiMys
Here’s the summary of The Collector’s Apprentice.
“A clever and complex tale of art fraud, theft, scandal, murder, and revenge.” —Publishers Weekly
In this surprising, noirish page-turner, B. A. Shapiro once again takes readers into the world of art, glamour, and mystery. Accused of helping her fiancé steal her family’s fortune and her father’s art collection, Paulien Mertens has fled to France. To protect herself from the law and the wrath of those who lost everything, she has created a new identity. Paulien, aka Vivienne, takes a position working for an American art collector modeled after real-life eccentric museum founder Albert Barnes and quickly becomes caught up in the 1920s Paris of artists and expats, including post-Impressionist painter Henri Matisse and writer Gertrude Stein. From there, she sets out to recover her father’s art collection, prove her innocence, and exact revenge on her ex-fiancé. B. A. Shapiro has made the historical art thriller her own, and once again she gives us an unforgettable tale about what we see—and what we refuse to see.
*****
If you’d like to hear the conversation, check out the video.