It’s the summertime of 1922, and nineteen-year-old Paulien Mertens sees herself in Paris-broke, disowned, and completely only. Everyone in Belgium, including her very own family, is convinced she stole thousands in a sophisticated con video game perpetrated by her then-fiance, George Everard. To protect herself from regulations as well as the wrath of these who lost everything, she creates a new identity, a Frenchwoman called Vivienne Gregsby, and pieces out to recover her father’s artwork collection, prove her innocence-and about The Collector’s Apprentice: A Book exact revenge on George.

When the eccentric and wealthy American art collector Edwin Bradley, who’s based on real life museum founder Albert Barnes, offers Vivienne an ideal job, she is soon caught up in the Parisian world of post-Impressionists and expatriates-including Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse, with whom Vivienne becomes romantically entwined. As she moves between Paris and Philadelphia, where Bradley is usually building a skill museum, her life turns into even more complicated: George results with unclear motives . and then Vivienne is caught for Bradley’s murder.

B. A. Shapiro has made the historic art thriller her very own. In The Collector’s Apprentice, she gives us an unforgettable story about the measures to which people will choose their obsession, whether it be art, money, love, or vengeance.