SERIES: Heist Society, Book #1
AUTHORS: Ally Carter
AUTHORS: Ally Carter
PUBLISHER: Hyperion Book CH
PUBLICATION DATE: February 9, 2010
FORMAT: Hardcover
LENGTH: 287 pages
GENRE: Young Adult, Mystery
ISBN: 9781423116394
When Katarina Bishop was three, her parents took her on a trip to the Louvre…to case it. For her seventh birthday, Katarina and her Uncle Eddie traveled to Austria…to steal the crown jewels. When Kat turned fifteen, she planned a con of her own—scamming her way into the best boarding school in the country, determined to leave the family business behind. Unfortunately, leaving “the life” for a normal life proves harder than she’d expected.
Soon, Kat's friend and former co-conspirator, Hale, appears out of nowhere to bring Kat back into the world she tried so hard to escape. But he has a good reason: a powerful mobster has been robbed of his priceless art collection and wants to retrieve it. Only a master thief could have pulled this job, and Kat's father isn't just on the suspect list, he is the list. Caught between Interpol and a far more deadly enemy, Kat’s dad needs her help.
For Kat, there is only one solution: track down the paintings and steal them back. So what if it's a spectacularly impossible job? She's got two weeks, a teenage crew, and hopefully just enough talent to pull off the biggest heist in her family's history--and, with any luck, steal her life back along the way.
MY REVIEW:
This was a fun adventure that had the characters crisscrossing the globe.
One of my favourite family movies is National Treasure, where Nicolas Cage steals the Declaration of Independence to keep it out of the hands of would-be thieves. This book is like that!
Teenager Katarina Bishop is from an infamous family of thieves, and she has left the family business and is trying to lead a “normal” life at a boarding school in New York. Katarina is expelled from school for parking the headmaster’s convertible atop the school fountain, only she insists that she was framed. With her bags packed, she awaits a ride to pick her up and her rescuer turns out to be none other than her former partner in crime, Hale. He tells her that someone pulled off a job in Italy, stealing extremely valuable paintings from a private collection. The owner of said paintings is Arturo Taccone, a dangerous mobster, and he is convinced that the only person who could have pulled off such a sophisticated robbery is Katarina’s father. The message that Hale gives Katarina from her uncle is that her father must return the paintings or Taccone will take revenge on the Bishop family. Katarina flies to Paris to speak with her father to urge him to return the stolen possessions, but he claims to have an airtight alibi because he was busy pulling off a heist in Paris! Satisfied that her father is telling the truth, Katarina is about to take a taxi to the airport to return to the United States when she is apprehended by a goon who forces her into the back of a limo. She meets Taccone face-to-face, and he doesn’t believe that Katarina’s father wasn’t involved. He tells Katarina that she has two weeks to return what is rightfully his…or else.
Katarina decides that she must do the impossible, which is to track down Taccone’s priceless stolen collection and steal them back to put her family in the clear.
The story started off with a lot of excitement, so I was a bit disappointed that the level of adrenaline didn’t continue. The entire middle section of the book focused on Katarina assembling her team and planning how they were going to do it. There was a lot of telling but no action until the last 50 pages. Even still, I enjoyed the characters and the story well enough that I plan to continue with the rest of the series.
MY RATING:
This book qualifies as:
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