NCW Libraries

With his trademark humor and irreverence, Thomas Hoving, author of the best-selling Making the Mummies Dance, delves into the underbelly of the art world to reveal appalling scams, duplicitous perpetrators, and hapless dupes from the beginning of civilization to the present. From the shroud of Turin to Pre-Columbian pottery, Hoving exposes the biggest, the best, the most embarrassing, and the most costly forgeries in history - most never before published....

"After his father tells him the story of archaeological treasure hunter Moses Wilhelm Shapira, who, in 1883, committed suicide after the biblical scrolls he found were denounced by his long-time enemy, an award-winning journalist sets out to determine Shapira's guilt or innocence, in a modern-day mystery,"--NoveList.

"Emma Caan is a fake. She is a copier who has become so good at duplicating nineteenth-century artworks that her versions are often passed off as originals. But she is not a criminal; her paintings are commissioned by museums and ultra-wealthy collectors protecting their investments. Emma's more than mastered a Gauguin brushstroke and the curve of a van Gogh wheat stalk, but her job is often a painful reminder of the artistic dreams she once chased...

"In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancolico? On the trail of this mysterious...

On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art worth today over $500 million were stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The crime remains unsolved. Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there's more to this art heist than meets the eye. Claire has agreed to forge a painting for a powerful gallery owner in exchange for a one-woman show. But her suspicions about the painting lead Claire to 19th-century secrets ......

A woman art historian and an art thief join forces to find a stolen 15th century statue of the Dark Lady, one of Michelangelo's mistresses. Love blooms between Dr. Miranda Jones, a six-foot redhead, and Ryan Boldari, a handsome Irish-Italian, but can she trust him? Lots of detail on authenticating art.

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...

After a train wreck sends art critic George Steele into a mental tailspin, he's fired from his job at a New York art museum. Seems unjust, until you learn there was no train wreck. This relentless, nervy film noir explores the sinister world of violence and the monied world of aesthetics as Steele's attempt to reconstruct what really happened leads him to murder, mania and an international conspiracy that threatens the museum's masterpieces.

While the Thea sisters are at the excavation site of a dig at Hierapolis, Professor Brenninger unearths a series of priceless and very old figurines, but the Thea Sisters think the discovery may be a scam and investigate.