The Picasso heist

Patterson's latest co-authored thriller follows an enterprising brother-and-sister team who are determined to steal a recently discovered Picasso painting from the Echelon auction house and replace it with a forgery. Even though they've already had extensive experience courtsiding--that is, getting a tennis umpire to slow down his calls so they can place bets a second or two before the odds change--Halston Graham and her older brother, Skip, can't do this on their own. So in the first of many deliberately engineered setbacks, Halston arranges to get caught at her job and spirited away by Blaggy Danchev, the big muscle for crime lord Anton Nikolov, so she can turn around and entice Nikolov and his minions into the heist. Armed with Nikolov's backing and a perfect replica created by Wolfgang, her friend and accomplice, Halston worms her way into the confidence of fashion designer and art buff Enzio Bergamo and Echelon CEO Charles Waxman, both of whom will be instrumental to the scheme in ways they could never have imagined. The heist doesn't go off without a hitch; there are many hitches, some real, some fake, before the prize is carried off and replaced with the copy. But that turns out to be only the opening act in an endless series of head-spinning felonies, complications, betrayals, and unmaskings that will keep the target audience turning pages far later into the night than they should. Canny fans will realize early on that they can stop reading any time and still have the satisfaction of having digested all the plot twists they can handle, and then some. The biggest deception is the title, which should really be 'The Picasso Heist, Etc.' Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.