A PERFECT EYE pits Lily Sparks, a paintings conservator who was trained to believe her eye is perfect, against a forger-turned-murderer who is hiding in plain sight. When Lily zeroes in on the killer as a failed artist, she learns this: Some forgers aren’t in it for the money; they do it to prove a point. And the ones who are caught tend to meet very bad ends. Here are Lily’s top five forgers: 1 Eric Hebborn: A British painter who trained at the Royal Academy of the Arts and forged Old Master drawings. Hebborn sought revenge against the art world because critics called his works “derivative”, “labored” and “self-conscious”. In 1996, shortly before he published The Art Forger’s Handbook with tricks of the trade including modern recipes for period pigments and ink, he was attacked and killed on a street in Rome. Hebborn’s murder is still unsolved. 2 Mark Hofmann: A mild-mannered Utah Mormon (“a scholarly country bumpkin”) who forged historical documents about the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. To lull experts, Hofmann expressed doubts about the authenticity of his finds. “Do you really think it’s genuine?” he’d say. In 1985, to buy time before his forgeries were discovered,…

I am fascinated by the heroines of this new series, A League of Extraordinary Women, who are suffragists! It was also particularly intriguing in the scenes where Queen Victoria shows up, to find that she was against this movement, and wanted to get rid of feminists. What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching this novel?  I spent some time in the archives of Oxford’s first women’s college, Lady Margaret Hall, to research my story. The first surprise was how pleased the archivist was about my interest in the first women at Oxford because they were so “under-explored”. I wondered why–these women were extraordinary, pioneers if you will, considering how unusual and controversial it was for a woman to go for higher education in 1879. I want to add that LMH shone a spotlight on the first women students this summer, when they marked the 140th anniversary of the college, and I was delighted when they asked me to share my research for the occasion. The other big surprise was how frequently objections to women’s rights in the Victorian era were couched in terms of concern for women’s health and happiness. Women were not allowed to fully matriculate…