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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Bestselling AuthorElle Stowell is a young woman with an unconventional profession: burglary. But Elle is no petty thief -- with just the right combination of smarts, looks, and skills, she can easily stroll through ritzy Bel Air neighborhoods and pick out the perfect home for plucking the most valuable items. This is how Elle has always gotten by -- she is good at it, and she thrives on the thrill. But after stumbling upon a grisly triple homicide while stealing from the home of a wealthy art dealer, Elle discovers that she is no longer the only one sneaking around. Somebody is searching for her.As Elle realizes that her knowledge of the high-profile murder has made her a target, she races to solve the case before becoming the next casualty, using her breaking-and-entering skills to uncover the truth about exactly who the victims were and why someone might have wanted them dead.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Burglar Elle Stowell, the whip-smart, fearless protagonist of this uneven standalone from Edgar winner Perry (The Bomb Maker), comes from a family of thieves. She approaches every job analytically and is meticulous in her planning. But when she breaks into an L.A. mansion and finds three dead bodies-one male art gallery owner and two affluent married women-naked on a bed in the master bedroom, she becomes the target of a group of professional killers. As the killers' search for her intensifies and the body count rises, the diminutive burglar must uncover the reason why the gallery owner and women were murdered before she becomes the next casualty. The first part of this tight narrative, which is equal parts mystery and thriller, is virtually un-put-downable. But the story starts to unravel in the second part, when numerous plot holes become apparent. In addition, the weak ending will leave readers less than satisfied. Perry fans will hope for a return to form next time. Agent: Mel Berger, WME. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In case you've forgotten, Perry (The Bomb Maker, 2018, etc.) reminds you that it takes a thief to catch a killer.Elle Stowell has robbed a lot of houses, but her discovery at the home of retired financial services officer Nick Kavanagh, owner of the Kavanagh Gallery, is a first: the naked corpse of Kavanagh, together with those of socialite Anne Satterthwaite Mannon and Hollywood director's wife Valerie McGee Teason, huddled together in the host's bed, each of them shot in the head. Even more bizarre, a digital movie camera at the crime scene has recorded everything from Kavanagh's original propositioning of the two women to Elle's entrance 12 hours later. What to do? Since "Elle was both good in intention and bad at carrying out good intentions," she neither destroys the memory card nor brings it to the LAPD but anonymously mails them a copy from which she's excised her own image and keeps a copy of the undoctored card herself to prove that she arrived on the scene long after the murders because she thinks that the worst thing that could happen to her is getting arrested. Sure enough, her very next job is interrupted by some peopleshe's not sure whoshe hears walking around the house, and her plan to join a friend on a long-distance vacation till things cool down ends with things considerably heated up. By that time, however, Elle's figured out that the biggest threat to her safety isn't the police but the killer whose handiwork she stumbled on. Instead of trying to solve the murders in order to prove her own innocence, she now has a much more compelling reason to figure out who's got her in their sights: turning them over to the authorities before they can kill her too.All the relentless drive of Perry's tales of concealment specialist Jane Whitefield (Poison Flower, 2012, etc.) but there's a less compelling logic behind both the burglar's actions and the murderer's. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As we've noted before, Perry writes very well about smart people, whichever side of the law they happen to be on: he shows them thinking, and that process of observing a mind at work, putting together a plan and then improvising on it, proves as compelling as any action scene, although Perry is plenty good at those, too. In his latest novel, the smart person being examined is a burglar, Elle Stowell, a young woman whose carefully designed appearance and lithe frame allow her both to blend in as she cases neighborhoods in tony Beverly Hills and Bel Air and to easily scale whatever drainpipe or climbing vine to gain access to the second floors of mansions. It's all going swimmingly until Elle finds three naked and very dead bodies in the bedroom of a home she was in the act of robbing. Elle skedaddles, but it quickly becomes apparent that the killers know about her and are eager to tie up any loose ends. So the thinking begins, as Elle tracks the murderers as they track her. What she uncovers an elaborate fine-art scam proves almost as fascinating as Elle's remarkable ability to put herself into and then extract herself from harm's way. Nobody drives a narrative like Perry; sure, he knows how to stomp on the gas pedal and negotiate the curves, but, best of all, he does that while dispensing unfailingly interesting information about stuff we've never bothered to think about, which is one more reason we can't get enough of Perry's smart people.--Bill Ott Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TROUBLE COMES CALLING ?? the Louisiana bayou parish where James Lee Burke sets his idiosyncratic regional novels. In THE NEW IBERIA BLUES (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), a condemned murderer named Hugo Tillinger has pulled off a daring escape from a Texas prison and is now hiding somewhere in his old neighborhood. Another recent arrival, the Hollywood director Desmond Cormier, has returned to his humble native roots to make a movie, installing himself and his entourage in a swell house with a spectacular view of the bay. From that vantage, Dave Robicheaux, the broody sheriff's deputy who has stamped his forceful personality on this series, lays eyes on yet another visitor - a woman nailed to a large wooden cross that washes up from the bay. The dead woman, the daughter of a local minister, volunteered for the Innocence Project and was working to free Tillinger from prison. But while there seems to have been a real connection between the minister's daughter and the escaped prisoner, Burke must exert himself to fit those Hollywood types into his brutal byzantine plot. (I stopped counting after the 10 th violent death.) But does anyone really read Burke expecting a coherent narrative? We're hanging on for Robicheaux's pensées, like his meditation on the living spirits of the dead: "I don't believe that time is sequential. I believe the world belongs to the dead as well as the unborn." We're keeping an eye out for vivid characters like Bella Delahoussaye, a blues singer with intimate knowledge of Big Mama Thornton's mournful "Ball and Chain." Maybe most of all, we're waiting for those angry outbursts when Robicheaux lets it rip: "I don't think you get it," he tells one of the movie people. "Louisiana is America's answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum. How'd you like to spend a few days in our parish prison?" Only if there's a new James Lee Burke novel in the cell. "there was esoteric knowledge involved in being a burglar," Thomas Perry advises us in THE BURGLAR (Mysterious Press, $26). It takes considerable expertise to select the right house, break in without waking the dog and recognize what's worth stealing. Elle Stowell has been at this profession since she was 15, but this petite, lithe young pro isn't prepared to find three people - all naked and shot between the eyes - piled in a heap on the king-size bed in the master suite of the house in Bel-Air she's broken into. The protagonists of Perry's ingenious thrillers are usually skilled at devising schemes for getting out of awkward situations. Elle uses her wits to break into tight spots, like the headquarters of the shady security firm hunting her down for involving herself in the triple homicide. Elle performs tricky feats here, but her pieces de resistance are the elaborate strategies she engineers to break into that company's control center. If Perry is the king of obsessive strategists (and I so declare him), Elle is his pinup model. the thing is, Serge A. Storms is nuts; nonetheless, that doesn't stop Tim Dorsey's psycho hero from doing great deeds. While gripped in his never-ending quest to write an oral history of his beloved Florida, Serge manages to violently dispatch profiteers who menace the innocent and unwary. NO SUNSCREEN FOR THE DEAD (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) finds Serge on a mission to rescue retirees from the hucksters who prey on them. "They have absolutely no soul," he rages, after viewing one gullible couple's junk-filled home. "They will sell and sell and sell until you either lose your house or call the cops." With Coleman, his perpetually stoned companion at his side, Serge storms into Boca Shores, a retirement community of nice people who need his help. After snuffing out an abusive caretaker, he's honored with a raucous pool party, a tribute he repays by treating everyone to a rollicking road trip we'd love to sign up for. AUGUST OCTAVIO snow is a big Detroit booster. In LIVES LAID AWAY (Soho Crime, $26.95), Stephen Mack Jones picks up his gung-ho protagonist where the author left him in his first novel, "August Snow" - cleaning up his beat-up neighborhood in Mexicantown. Using the millions awarded from his successful case against the Police Department, this ex-cop has already rescued his childhood home and is now renovating the other houses on his street. Snow thinks his old job is safely behind him - until a girl in a Marie Antoinette costume is tossed off the Ambassador Bridge. The victim is 19-year-old Isadora (Izzy) Rosalita del Torres, an undocumented worker who went missing in a government raid, and her battered body indicates she was being exploited by sex traffickers. Snow swings into action-hero mode and recruits a posse of friends and neighbors for a vigilante mission that dovetails with his crusade against ICE raids. Seeing Detroit through Snow's adoring eyes is sweet. But except for the bad guys, who go out in a blazing gun battle, the characters are too good to be true, from Snow's sainted godmother and a priest who operates an underground railroad to Snow himself, who could use a few flaws to make him human. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.