BA Shapiro - THE COLLECTOR'S APPRENTICE & Tim Johnston - THE CURRENT
We are pleased to host BA Shapiro for a rescheduled event, and to add a second author: Tim Johnston!
From the best-selling author of The Art Forger and The Muralist
“Dazzling and seductive, a tour de force, The Collector’s Apprentice is an exhilarating tale of shifting identities, desire, and intrigue set between 1920s Paris and Philadelphia.”—Dawn Tripp, bestselling author of Georgia
It’s the summer of 1922, and nineteen-year-old Paulien Mertens finds herself in Paris—broke, disowned, and completely alone. Everyone in Belgium, including her own family, believes she stole millions in a sophisticated con game perpetrated by her then-fiancé, George Everard. To protect herself from the law and the wrath of those who lost everything, she creates a new identity, a Frenchwoman named Vivienne Gregsby, and sets out to recover her father’s art collection, prove her innocence—and exact revenge on George.
When the eccentric and wealthy American art collector Edwin Bradley offers Vivienne the perfect job, she is soon caught up in the Parisian world of post-Impressionists and expatriates—including Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse, with whom Vivienne becomes romantically entwined. As she travels between Paris and Philadelphia, where Bradley is building an art museum, her life becomes even more complicated: George returns with unclear motives . . . and then Vivienne is arrested for Bradley’s murder.
B. A. Shapiro has made the historical art thriller her own. In The Collector’s Apprentice, she gives us an unforgettable tale about the lengths to which people will go for their obsession, whether it be art, money, love, or vengeance.
Tim Johnston, whose breakout debut Descent was called “astonishing,” “dazzling,” and “unforgettable” by critics, returns with The Current, a tour de force about the indelible impact of a crime on the lives of innocent people.
In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their car from the icy Black Root River. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene—half frozen but alive.
What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community’s memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may still live among them.
Determined to find answers, the surviving young woman soon realizes that she’s connected to the earlier unsolved case by more than just a river, and the deeper she plunges into her own investigation, the closer she comes to dangerous truths, and to the violence that simmers just below the surface of her hometown.
Grief, suspicion, the innocent and the guilty—all stir to life in this cold northern town where a young woman can come home, but still not be safe. Brilliantly plotted and unrelentingly propulsive, The Current is a beautifully realized story about the fragility of life, the power of the past, and the need, always, to fight back.
Tim Johnston, a native of Iowa City, is the author of the bestselling Descent, as well as a young adult novel, Never So Green, and the story collection Irish Girl, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.
Events at Brazos Bookstore: A few things to remember
IN PERSON EVENTS
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Books to be signed must be purchased directly from us
VIRTUAL EVENTS
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Please visit the individual event page to find out more about the platform and register
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Not all books will be signed. Please see the event page to find out if purchasers will receive signed book plates with the book
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Personalized books are unavailable unless otherwise stated on the event page
Brazos Book Clubs
JULY MEETING
Meeting on Tuesday, July 25 at 6:30pm CT. Click here to register.
We will be joined by author Cassandra Khaw
SEPTEMBER PICK
Meeting on September 9 at 3pm. Click here to register
We will be joined by authors Larry Schwarz and Iva-Marie Palmer