Artifice
The daughter of Amsterdam artists, eighteen-year-old Isa de Smit has suffered ever since her mother’s death and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands more than three years earlier. Her father has withdrawn into his garret studio, leaving her alone to keep the family’s gallery open and protect an original Vermeer than had belonged to one of her father’s Jewish students, long deported to a death camp. After selling one of her father’s forgeries to Nazi collectors to pay taxes, Isa discovers her friends Willem and Truus, members of the resistance, are smuggling Jewish babies out of the city. She decides to help them with the proceeds of additional forgeries. Her art sales, which risk her being branded a collaborator as well as found out as a seller of forgeries, attract the attention of Michel Lange, the son of a Viennese art collector who, with his brother, joined the Gestapo. But Michel is now looking for a way out and a way to help Isa, with whom he’s fallen in love. He wants to hide in the basement of the gallery before deserting, but can he be trusted, with resistance members and a forger upstairs?
Well-chosen, fascinating details immerse the reader in the art world of occupied Amsterdam, where every knock at the door, or even a soldier’s stare on the street, could lead to disaster. Fictional characters interact seamlessly with real figures from the time, including famed forger Han van Meegeren and the two rival dealers who filled top Nazi officials’ homes and offices with real and faked masterpieces from occupied lands. Readers learn of the meticulous process used to reproduce centuries-old paintings and the moral dilemmas faced by those who struggled to maintain their humanity under the rule of monsters.
