NCW Libraries

A beguiling painting holds the secrets of a woman's past and calls into question everything she thought she knew about the man she loved.

"Former Budapest cop Attila Feher would really like to see art expert Helena Marsh again, so he arranges a contract for her to determine whether a painting is a copy of a famous Artemisia Gentileschi canvas or the real thing. A simple appraisal becomes a dangerous assignment when usual eastern European gangsters show up and people start dying and the seething corruption that underlies the lost promise of post-Soviet Hungary swirls to the surface....

When a slam-bang of a crime brings a beautiful new client into Stone Barrington's office, little does he know his association with her will pull him into a far more serpentine mystery in the exclusive world of art. It's a business where a rare find could make a career -- and a collection -- and mistakes in judgment are costly. And under its genteel and high-minded veneer lurks an assortment of grifters and malfeasants eager to cash in on the game....

"August, 1911: The Mona Lisa is stolen by Vincent Peruggia. Exactly what happens in the two years before its recovery is a mystery. Many replicas of the Mona Lisa exist, and more than one historian has wondered if the painting now in the Louvre is a fake, switched in 1911. Present day: art professor Luke Perrone digs for the truth behind his most famous ancestor: Peruggia. His search attracts an Interpol detective with something to prove and an unfamiliar...

Isa de Smit grew up in her parents' art gallery in Amsterdam, but in the middle of the war she survives by selling fake paintings to the Nazis while trying to help her friend, Truus, smuggle Jewish babies to safety--but in 1943 it is hard to know who to trust.

"A gripping story of deception in the world of international fine art. Restorer and spy Gabriel Allon embarks on a dangerous hunt across Europe for the secret behind the forgery of a seventeenth-century masterpiece that has fooled experts and exchanged hands for millions"-- "Legendario espía y restaurador de arte, Gabriel Allon por fin ha roto sus lazos con la inteligencia israelí y se ha establecido tranquilamente en Venecia, el único lugar donde...

A profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. Dominic Smith deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth....