Ten years ago, Dani Poissant thought that she’d left her old art heist crew behind for good. Nowadays, she works as an itinerant con artist, traveling from town to town and finding easy marks, with a side of Robin Hood do-gooding along the way. Her only companion is her beloved dog Sunflower, also a stray…
I’ve always loved how heist stories follow a particular formula but manage to delight me every time. I never thought that I would have the ability to write one myself until the idea for Women of Good Fortune grabbed onto me one day and wouldn’t let go. Suddenly, I had this intense desire to explore…
Lem Devlin has had it with being surrounded by art that costs more than his entire life. Working for the Fine Artemis shipping and storage company, he doesn’t mind so much the value assigned to the beauty he sees every day. What bothers him is the casual consumerism that buys an extravagant work of art…
Heist novels are a staple of the genre but often they are few and far between. Robin Hood thieves have taken hold, and often when I read fictional criminals, they are less like Richard Stark’s Parker and Wallace Stroby’s Crissa Stone and more like a shadowy justice department where the important thing is to steal…
Willie Sutton famously said (or, perhaps, didn’t say) that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. But that’s not the only place the money is. It’s in casinos too (thus, the Ocean’s [insert number] films). It’s sometimes in mobsters’ homes (the focus of Widows, for instance). But if you’re going to commit possibly…
In Tom Hunt’s One Fatal Mistake, eighteen-year-old Joshua Mayo kills a man in a terrible accident, but the tragedy quickly becomes a hit-and-run. Not reporting the accident to the police, Josh confides only in his mother—and then everything goes wrong. One Fatal Mistake is somewhat of a misnomer because it takes the reader deep inside…
PART I: THE HEIST At 3:20 a.m. on October 16, 2012, the Trigion Security control center dispatched two guards to investigate an alarm trip at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. While Trigion supplied onsite guards for the art museum’s visiting hours, after closing, the museum made do with visits by roving security patrols. By the…
For a movie that has accumulated such a high volume of accolades since its premiere, it’s a bit perplexing to find that Baby Driver is actually a bit of a difficult movie to review. Perhaps it’s because so much has been said about the film already, but the more likely reason is that the movie…
When I wrote an appreciation of Lionel White’s 1955 noir novel The Big Caper for my Lost Classics of Noir series on this site, I called White “the master of the heist (gone wrong) novel.” This new Stark House Press edition of two of White’s edgy crime stories helps back that claim. In The Snatchers…
In December 2002, two burglars broke into the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They didn’t use helicopters or lasers or any of the stuff art thieves use in the movies; they climbed a fifteen-foot ladder to the roof and got into the second floor (European first floor), where the main display halls are. They…
