Five top books about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft

The staff of the Christian Science Monitor tagged five books – fiction and nonfiction – that share a connection to the notorious March 18, 1990, theft of 13 masterworks from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, including:

The Music Lesson, by Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber's 1999 novel The Music Lesson imagines the theft of another Vermeer painting under a very different set of circumstances. ("The Concert" was the Vermeer work stolen from the Gardner.) But the novel offers an interesting convergence with some ideas about the Gardner theft. One long-held theory about the missing Gardner works is that they were stolen to benefit the Irish Republic Army and were perhaps being held in Ireland. Weber's novel tells the story of an American art historian urged by her IRA-connected cousin, first to help steal a Vermeer, and then to watch over it by living with it in an isolated cottage in West Cork, Ireland.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see R.A. Scotti's five best books about art thefts.

Writers Read: Katharine Weber (April 2008).

--Marshal Zeringue