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milesss's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
one part account and biography of various figures and organizations potentially connected to the case, one part autobiographical account of an obsession. takes the standard prose vis a vis cops and the criminal legal system's approach to the heist - one part gushing, one part eyeroll, 0 parts criticism.
kaileyma's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
helena_chris's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Slow but really good and interesting!
ear_ofcorn's review against another edition
2.0
this book is really just an ode to the way men obsess and try to find meaning from their obsessing. clearly this guy stumbled into this case and genuinely believed, in what can only be described as a baffling display of male hubris, that he singlehandedly could solve it, with no detective training or inside angle. you can tell he really thought he would become a hero. but he pretty much got nowhere. at one point, he just walked around a random towns in ireland looking at people to see if he could spot whitey bulger just casually walking along the street. (he could not). anyway it pretty much ends with him going "i got pretty obsessed with this, but my wife and i were having a baby so i quit to return to normal but man those paintings are pretty." the overdramatic he earnestly uses to describe deeply uninteresting details can be pretty entertaining, but (to quote my favorite-ever book review) it "stops being funny when you realize just how long it is."
bluenicorn's review against another edition
3.0
This is a really interesting book- very revealing about museum life and an inside scoop on art theft. My only issue was that it was kind of like one of those Geraldo specials, where he is going to find Cleopatra's tomb... after the commercial break... and of course he never does. So this book, too, ends on a note of 'Well, I didn't solve anything, and it's still gone, but I learned stuff' which just didn't do it for me. Still interesting.