STEALING MR. RIGHT

A marriage between a jewel thief and an FBI agent is an unconventional match made in heaven.

Twenty-five-year-old Penelope Blue’s funny and irreverent narration as “the world’s most claustrophobic jewel thief” begins in an air duct above a jewelry store in Manhattan on the night of a big heist. The object of desire is a $2 million diamond necklace that Penelope’s father, a notorious thief known as the Blue Fox, attempted to steal 10 years earlier. Unfortunately, Penelope’s heist is foiled by an FBI agent, Grant Emerson, who happens to be her husband. Of course, Grant has no idea his wife is in the air duct; he thinks Penelope is a dance instructor. The story of their not-so-coincidental meeting, courtship, and engagement is told in alternating chapters, while the primary timeline follows the cat-and-mouse game their marriage has become as Grant gets closer every day to catching the culprit of a series of robberies he’s been pursuing for a while. Alternating timelines can sometimes weigh down the plot of a novel, but in this case, the two are so closely related that the structure doesn’t detract from the story. This is a fun romantic caper, and Penelope is a refreshingly sarcastic heroine. There is a lighthearted chemistry among all the characters, including the rest of Penelope’s thieving gang: Riker, the mastermind, Oz, the getaway driver, and Jordan, the detonation expert. They have all known each other since they were homeless teen runaways on the streets of New York. While there is relatively little explicit sex for a romance novel, the relationship between Penelope and Grant still manages to be sexy.

Morgan (Model Behavior, 2015, etc.) has superbly revived the pairing of romance and jewel heists.