Five top books about the world's most audacious 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 Gardner Heist, by Ulrich Boser

Journalist Ulrich Boser conducted more than 200 interviews and traveled to four countries and a dozen states (crossing that “thin, Rubiconic line between passion and obsession,” he confesses) in his research for The Gardner Heist. Boser's concise, gripping book lays out the essentials of the Gardner case and the decades of fruitless searching that followed. "Boser deftly steers readers through a cast of characters ranging from the highest of brow (museum curators and art experts) to the lowest imaginable (thuggish, bottom-feeding gangsters)," wrote Monitor Books editor Marjorie Kehe in her 2009 review of the book. But read this one at your own peril: as a former art fence once warned: “[The Gardner case] is more addictive than crack.”

Read about a novel on the list.

The Gardner Heist also appears on R.A. Scotti's five best list of books about art thefts.

--Marshal Zeringue