An inviting, if uneven, story of a modern-day gentleman thief.
Debut author Hoppe offers a crime thriller about the difficulty of stealing famous art.
Tyler Sears is an art thief who’s had the bad luck of being caught more than once. After a stint in jail, “courtesy of the botched [Museo del] Prado job,” he’s decided to go straight. He attempts to live a life of normalcy as a bartender in New York City, and there, he deals with both romantic and familial difficulties. But when he’s summoned to the foreboding office of a wealthy Japanese businessman, his fears of being forced back into crime are realized. Tyler must steal a dozen well-known paintings from an upcoming art show in Washington, D.C.; the businessman is threatening his family, so he can’t fail. Relying on connections to the criminal underground and his cunning talent for planning, Tyler embarks on his mission but fears the task ahead. Added into the mix is the lovely Lucy, a girl Tyler jilted after a rendezvous in Paris but whom he can’t seem to forget. Can Tyler steal the paintings without being caught, killed or getting his heart broken? The story makes use of a range of well-scripted geographical details, jumping between New York City and Washington with frequent stops in between—including a brief foray in the Southwest—and the author shows a deep awareness of these locations. In Hoppe’s hands, Tyler stakes his claim as a cool gentleman thief: He’s a lover of fine art, liked by just about everyone he meets and never one to turn down a joint from a pretty lady. However, some readers may not have a high tolerance for an ARTnews-reading ex-felon bartender. His antagonists also tend to lack subtlety; Tyler’s employer, for example, seems strangely ambivalent about his welfare, an attitude which ultimately proves counterproductive.
An inviting, if uneven, story of a modern-day gentleman thief.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-940716-15-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sturdy legal thrills for readers willing to go the distance with a flawed hero in an even more flawed world.
Now that he’s won two high-profile murder cases, Alabama “billboard lawyer” Jason Rich takes on his most challenging client: himself.
When methamphetamine lord Tyson Cade is gunned down outside a grocery store moments after clerk Marcia “Dooby” Darnell spurned his latest advance, you’d think the woods would be full of suspects, from Matty Dean, the distributor who immediately seizes violent control of the Sand Mountain meth operation in Cade’s absence, to the hard-used Dooby herself. But newly appointed Marshall County Sheriff Hatty Daniels and newly reelected D.A. Aloysius Holloway “Wish” French ignore all the others to concentrate on Jason, whose two earlier brushes with Cade brought him nothing but grief, who was seen nearby and caught on camera a few minutes later, and whom Cade identified as his killer with his dying breath. Insisting against all advice on defending himself, Jason accepts an inspired suggestion as his advisory counsel: Shay Lankford, the career prosecutor Wish French defeated in the last election. After rooting around endlessly in local secrets and scandals that take a heavy toll on Jason’s allies, profiler Albert Hooper comes up with enough evidence to guarantee a mistrial. But Jason doesn’t want a new trial; he wants to win the trial he’s in, and eventually he does, though not without spending a good deal of time relitigating the painful legacies of his first two murder cases. And although this case seems designed to avoid the very possibility of a surprise ending, Bailey closes by pulling a rabbit as big as a kangaroo from his hat.
Sturdy legal thrills for readers willing to go the distance with a flawed hero in an even more flawed world.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781662516634
Page Count: 527
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
