The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft

If you have not been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, believe me, it is worth the visit. The founder, a wealthy American, Isabella Stewart Gardner, amassed an impressive collection of art from her travels all over the world, and she it her duty to share and educate the public with her treasured cultural relics. Her love of art is reflected in this museum, where each exhibition gives off an aura of intimacy, as if this were the very house that she lived in. Rather than organizing the art in a methodical fashion, relying on intuition, Mrs. Stewart "decorated" each "room" with art in a way that she found pleasing.

Visiting the museum is really a calming experience, especially sitting by the courtyard with pretty plants growing and blooming year round. Just beware of the guards surrounding the place. They keep an extremely tight eye on all visitors, making sure there is no funny business going down. The tight security is actually the result of a heist at the museum in 1990, where thieves escaped with invaluable art including three Rembrandts and one Vermeer. To this day, the robbers still have yet to be caught, and we still have no idea where the art is.

This robbery forms the plot of the book, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser. A journalist turned amateur sleuth, Boser takes the reader through his investigation as he pursues leads and collects a wealth of clues. It was such an entertaining read that solving the actual mystery become secondary to the narrative.