How long does it take to read The Gardner Heist?
The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft
Ulrich Boser
The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser takes about 6 hours 32 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 32 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2009. 356 pages, about 97,900 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 53 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 32 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 5 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
One museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld — the story behind the lost Gardner masterpieces and the art detective who swore to get them back Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and a $5-million reward, not a single painting has been recovered. Worth a total of $500 million, the missing masterpieces have become the Holy Grail of the art world and one of the nation's most extraordinary unsolved mysteries. Art detective Harold Smith worked on the theft for years, and after his death, reporter Ulrich Boser inherited his case files. Traveling deep into the art underworld, Boser explores Smith's unfinished leads and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including the brilliant rock 'n' roll art thief; the golden-boy gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse; the deadly mobster James "Whitey" Bulger; and the Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, who stipulated in her will that nothing should ever be changed in her museum, a provision followed so closely that the empty frames of the stolen works still hang on the walls. Boser eventually cracks one of the biggest mysteries of the case and uncovers the identities of the men who robbed the museum nearly two decades ago. A tale of art and greed, of obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as the stolen masterpieces themselves. (Description from jacket flap)
Subjects: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Art thefts, Museums, Theft from museums, Art, History
