Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and stole 13 masterpieces including five Degas, three Rembrandts, and a Vermeer. The plundered works are worth an estimated $500 million today, and the theft remains the largest unsolved art heist in history.

 

Before he died in 2005, Harold Smith, one of the world’s greatest art detectives, believed that he was a breath away from cracking the seventeen year-old case. For the Smithsonian Books imprint of HarperCollins, I plan to tell the story of Harold Smith and the lost Gardner paintings and chronicle my attempt to pick up where Smith left off and return the paintings to the museum’s walls.