Artifice

Isa de Smit grows up in Amsterdam, where her parents run a small gallery filled with art and creative life. The German occupation drains that bright world. Works the Nazis label so-called degenerate art are seized, artists go into hiding or are sent away, and Isa's closest friend, Truus, has slipped off to join the Dutch resistance. Meanwhile, the occupiers keep collecting the country's masterpieces to feed the Third Reich's hunger for culture.

When unpaid taxes put her cherished but nearly empty gallery at risk, Isa decides to turn the tables and make the Nazis pay. She sells them a counterfeit, a copy of a Rembrandt painted by her father. The deal pulls her dangerously close to being seen as a collaborator, one of the city's most despised groups. The forgery ends up in Hitler's hands. On the way to that sale, Isa learns that Truus belongs to a resistance network smuggling Jewish babies out of Amsterdam, but the work needs far more money than Truus has. Isa believes one more fake, a copy of a Vermeer, could raise it. First she must master the skill of a gifted forger, before the children are deported and before she is exposed as a collaborator.

Her unlikely ally is a young German soldier who has been blackmailing and stealing Dutch art and now says he wants to desert the army. The novel asks what holds real worth and how hard it can be to tell a fake apart, in paintings and in people. Its characters echo two real figures: Han van Meegeren, a forger who sold fakes to Hermann Goering, and Johann van Hulst, who is credited with rescuing 600 Jewish children from death in Amsterdam.

Sharon Cameron, author of The Light in Hidden Places, sets war, resistance and art against themes of trust, betrayal, beauty and defiance. The result is a historical thriller with shifting loyalties and plenty of twists.