Heist Society by Ally Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
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 her back into the world she tried so hard to escape. But he has 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 history-or at least her family’s (very crooked) history.
Heist Society is a past-paced caper about Kat Bishop having to return to a life of art theft, to pull off her greatest con yet, in order to save her father. Kat wanted a slice of normal life, and she managed to con herself into a prestigious boarding school, but barely 3 months in, her friend from her former life, Hale gets her expelled so that he can get her help to save her father from a notorious, uh, bad man (?). Anyway, she has to steal back some stolen art, but the original theft was committed by a master adopting a famous pseudonym. So, she and her squad of Hale, her cousin Gabrielle, and other family friends have to figure out how the theft was done, trace the steps and guess where the art could be hidden now – all before the deadline of 2 weeks set by the person holding a sword over her father’s head.
This book is a fast read – they are jumping from city to city, tracing clues. It is a mystery wrapped with a heist – and it is exciting. There are some elements that defy belief, however, like the fact that even in disguise, they are still teenagers (Kat is only 15!) and still don’t get called out, and that even under surveillance, the Interpol couldn’t put a name to her face when she meets her father. There is a nice cast of secondary characters – the geek, the weapons specialist, the goofy siblings, the cool collected bad boy – which seems cliche, but hey, it was still fun. The story arc of the paintings also calls on the Nazis stealing art from families, and how they were used in shady deals. The ending, open-ended though it may be, brings out excitement for what the next adventure will be.
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