THE TIME OF MY HEIST

A middle-aged Florida pizza shop owner stumbles into a crime carnival that reads like a male-oriented counterpart to Golden’s Stolen Pieces (2024).

It all begins when Virginia Kent, the newest server at Shepherd’s Pies on Florida’s Laguna Key, asks Preston Shepherd if he’ll pretend to be her boyfriend in order to keep her mother, Deandra, who’s found her there, from dragging her home to her family of wealthy, soulless lawyers. Shepherd, who’s not much for the ladies, reluctantly agrees, but Deandra ends up leaving the place with Michael Martin, Shepherd’s wealthy landlord, instead. Problem solved—until Deandra fails to return to the family manse herself because she’s been kidnapped by ruffians who kill Martin and demand over a million dollars for her safe return. When the Kents convene to vote on whether to pay the ransom, Ginny and her father, Deandra’s ex-husband, Bradley, are the only family members to endorse the plan. (The naysaying motive of Ginny’s brother Vincent, a Laguna Key councilman who thinks his campaign for mayor would benefit from some “poor us” publicity, is especially despicable.) So it’s up to Ginny and Shepherd, who’s slipped from playing her fiancé to becoming her actual lover, to join Charlie Cardello, a mobbed-up former client of the Kents who’s been playing dead for five months, in a robbery that will give them enough money to satisfy the kidnappers. The rest of the tale is relatively routine, surprising only readers who thought the heist would go off without a hitch.

A brightly written, fast-moving action/romance/fantasy in which no crimes are punished and everything ends happily anyway.