Book Review

It Takes a Thief by Sloane Steele

I like heists and capers, and I really like art theft stories in particular because sometimes the art itself becomes a massive McGuffin. In a really satisfying art heist story, the interpersonal relationships become more interesting than the priceless whatsit being stolen, and the people and their reasons for heisting provide the narrative momentum. That shift from “steal the thing” to “why are we stealing the thing” can make for a terrific story.

With It Takes a Thief, there’s plenty of heist planning and there are some relationships I enjoyed, but the romance isn’t one of them. Usually when I read a romance, I want more of the scenes between the protagonists. I look for the conversations they have and read closely for the signs of tension and attraction. That was not the case here. I caught myself skimming the scenes between Jared and Audrey once they became repetitive. The romance suffers from a quick switch from lust to love with insufficient development. The tension of the heist planning and the attempts to set up the final theft ebb and flow in a way that made the pace of the story confusing, and by the end I was confused and annoyed.

Audrey, known as Data, is a hacker who regularly works with a person she knows as Mr. Green. Mr. Green is Jared Towers, a wealthy man whose father and uncle masterminded a Ponzi scheme, screwed many people out of their savings, and fled the country before they could get caught. Jared and his cousin Mia’s lives were ruined (the book makes sure to tell the reader this frequently) as were the lives of their mothers.

In order to enact revenge on their fathers for ruining many lives, Mia comes up with a scheme to steal art from their Bad Dad’s friends, all of whom had purchased different pieces on behalf of Bad Dads in order to finance…something? To give the absent schemers money to live somewhere? Jared and Mia probably know but they withhold so much information it was hard for me to care after the first half. Basically there’s art, it’s in the house of people who probably helped the Bad Dads in their scheme, and Mia and Jared want to steal the art, replace it with forgeries, and sell the real pieces to redistribute the money to people who were harmed in the original Ponzi scheme while also humiliating the Friends of Bad Dads who will (Ooops! Surprise!) be caught attempting to sell that forgery. But no one can know Mia and Jared are behind the heist.

In order to do all that, they need people to do the actual heist work for them. They can’t “get their hands dirty.” Except by spending a butt ton of money on the heist, which would seem like a series of traceable purchases should anyone be looking. Audrey, as the “hacker,” is supposed to gather the security specs and create the technological interruption that allows Nikki, the thief Mia and Jared have also hired, to steal the item in question. Mia especially treats Audrey and Nikki with condescension as if they are easily replaceable, despite Jared’s insistence that they’re the greatest at what they do.

Audrey and Nikki are the most entertaining relationship in the book. Nikki is an experienced thief who steals art and usually ransoms it. Nikki is unabashedly herself, is constantly hungry and happy to order takeout on Jared’s dime, and is curious about Audrey enough to be concerned about her signs of exhaustion and sadness. Her connection with Audrey is more engaging and fun than anything Jared and Audrey get up to. Audrey is initially isolated and suspicious of everyone; her personality blooms with each interaction with Nikki and their friendship is my favorite part of the story.

Jared and Mia’s motivation is never sufficiently supported by the narrative: initially they talk about their mothers, who are never present in the story, and how their lives were ruined because no one in high society believed that they didn’t have any knowledge of what their husbands were up to and were therefore shunned. I struggled to give 1/100th of a shit about these absent wealthy ladies’ hurt feelings.

Later the motivation shifts: that same suspicion had fallen upon Mia and Jared, and made their lives difficult, though there weren’t many details to underscore and explain that difficulty. Jared was in law school at the time and says at one point that no one would hire him. But as the story opens he has demanding clients and is a “fixer” (I couldn’t tell you what that means precisely) and seems to be doing well enough for himself that he and Mia can afford a LOT of gadgets, luxury apartments, and sufficient takeout to satisfy Nikki’s appetite, which is ravenous. (I really liked Nikki.)

Their attempts to decorate their heist with altruism fall flat. Mia and Jared are mad that the Bad Dads got away with hurting people, but they don’t spend much time researching or discussing the victims other than themselves. Later the beneficiaries of the heist are mentioned in minor asides that I guess are meant to show how very much on the side of good Mia and Jared are, but it’s so little and so incidental it doesn’t do much to enhance the heist, their motivations, or their role as sympathetic characters.

My sympathy for Audrey also suffered whenever she would make comments about drug users (“junkies”) or about the “sleazy” dates her roommate Misty would bring home from “her job at the strip club.” If you’re looking for a book that avoids casual shaming of dancers and of people with drug addiction, this is not that book. Moreover, a lot of individual words do a LOT of heavy lifting in this book, and not all that lifting is appealing or effective. Terms like, “fixer,” “hacker,” “junkie,” “user,” “crossing the line” “grey areas” are thrown around without any corroborating detail to the point where the narrative’s insistence rendered them all meaningless or insulting or annoying.

For example: how exactly is Audrey a hacker? What precisely is she doing? Much like comedy is often found in the details, tension is also in the details. There isn’t enough precision about Audrey’s skill set to support the assertion that she knows anything about hacking. Or computers, really. She types and listens to music on headphones, but the demonstration of extreme or even mid level competence that’s part of effective revenge and heist planning isn’t present. Nikki demonstrates more specific competence in her craft than Audrey does, which also served to make her more interesting than Audrey or Jared.

The romance between Jared and Audrey is uneven, uninteresting, and underdeveloped. He goes from having pants feelings (™ Capt. Awkward) to deciding he’s in love with her, but much like Audrey’s hacker skills, none of that development happens in a way that’s present on the page, and therefore believable. The conflicts between them shift and collapse a few times during the course of the story: first it’s that Audrey doesn’t have enough info to trust Jared, and then, when she learns the scope of the plan, she’s angry that he didn’t tell her.

Audrey is also mistrustful because she’s more aware of the substantial differences between them. Her financial situation is very precarious: she uses the money she earns from “hacking” to pay for her grandmother’s assisted living. Her grandmother raised her and is now slowly disappearing into dementia; the need for more attentive and more expensive care is imminent. Audrey works at a coffee shop to pay her rent and other bills, but her “dark web” earnings cover that care.

The heist itself becomes drawn out and increasingly complicated, and because there’s no real leader or person who understands all the steps that need to happen, the repeated moments of incompetence yielded frustration and concern for me as a reader. Sometimes the collaboration between Nikki, Audrey, and the art forger who joins the group later was entertaining, but it also highlighted how much they collectively hadn’t thought about already. I worried more about Nikki, who seemed to be placed in situations without sufficient support, than I cared about the heist itself, or about Audrey and Jared’s relationship, which suffered against the drama of the heist.

I think part of the problem here is my own expectations as a reader. With a heist, I expect a collection of people with clear motivations (including “Get Paid,” which is a very fine motivation and probably why I liked Nikki so much). I want to read about people who have extremely high skill levels and assured competence in their fields, and I want to read about the tension of those individuals being thrown together unexpectedly.

I don’t know what Jared’s competence was; the cover copy says he can talk his way into or out of anything, but I didn’t see much of that aside from his attempts to soothe his cousin’s outrage. The skill set I did see: Jared can bankroll a heist to soothe his hurt daddy feelings. This is not competence, and neither is it noble altruism. He and Mia pay lip service to the idea of redistributing the stolen money to the families who were duped in the original Ponzi scheme but those individuals are distant backdrop to their own hurt feelings.

Audrey used hacker words and carried her computer around with her, but aside from reading code and browsing forums, her competence was mostly displayed in her announcing that she suddenly had the solution to whatever problem they faced, with no explanation of how she got there or where that knowledge came from. Believable competence requires showing the work and the continuity of skill development, and Audrey mostly read like a game of hacker buzzword bingo instead of a real character. And Jared had money. That was pretty much the sum of his character. He had money. And feelings.

With a romance, I expect to be invested in the success of the romantic relationship between the protagonists. I want to know what attracts them to one another (at one point Audrey thinks, “His profile was strong and beautiful and begged to be stroked.” Does that mean she’s going to pet his nose?! I tried this on my husband and he was really annoyed). I want to know why they think they can’t be together and what they’re willing to do to overcome those internal and external obstacles.

The heist that brought Jared and Audrey together created circumstantial tension that later dissolved into interpersonal conflict that never moved beyond “I’m mad at you,” and ended up being the least interesting aspect of the story. I never fully believed in the elite, essential skills of either one, and I was never convinced of their motivations or the necessity of the heist specifics as Jared engineered them.

I was invested in finding out what happened, and kept turning the pages, but I was mostly focused on Nikki and the others working toward the goal they were hired for, because I liked them and wanted them to succeed (and get paid). I didn’t care about the heist or the reasons for it, but I did care about the people doing the work to make it happen, and I loved the three women’s scenes together. And I’m definitely going to read book two. Nikki is the heroine, and she was tremendous fun.

This book is available from:
  • Available at Amazon
  • Order this book from apple books

  • Order this book from Barnes & Noble
  • Order this book from Kobo

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

It Takes a Thief by Sloane Steele

View Book Info Page

Add Your Comment →

  1. Pear says:

    Assuming “fixer” means like Olivia Pope in “Scandal” but it sounds like the book is assuming the reader is familiar with that show at all.

    I also love a heist story, so thanks for this review to save me some time! Hoping some commenters will have some good suggestions.

  2. Georgina says:

    Somebody on Twitter was talking this up as being inspired by Leverage. That’s totally my jam, so I was curious about this one — sad to hear that the romance didn’t work for you. Nikki sounds great though.

    Pear, this Rec League from 2018 might be of interest, thought perhaps people will have some newer recs:

    https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2018/04/rec-league-heists/

  3. flchen1 says:

    Thanks for this review. Like Pear, I tend to love a heist story, but like you, I want it to be well thought out and planned. This sounds like a heist story that might happen if I were in charge, which is to say, I definitely wouldn’t want to read that! Yikes! And sounds like Nikki is a hoot!

  4. Pear says:

    @Georgina thank you! I’d started down that Rec League some time back but it got buried in my bookmarks, so now I’ll have to actually start working my way through the list!

  5. BethSmash says:

    This book is boring. I was trying to get into it, but I just can’t. I think a romance between Nikki and Audrey would be WAY more believable, because they actually spend time together and have fun. And Nikki at least LEARNS about Audrey.

    It was rec’d somewhere as, if you miss Leverage, try this. And I TOTALLY miss Leverage, but I’d rather just watch Leverage, it didn’t really work for me.

Add Your Comment

Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

↑ Back to Top