Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History

Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History is an account of the 2003 robbery of the Diamond Center building in Antwerp. It was the largest jewel heist in history and, most likely, the largest robbery of any sort ever committed. Experts estimate that as much as $500 million in diamonds, cash, gold and other precious items was stolen when thieves broke into a state of the art -- and supposedly impregnable -- vault in the basement of a heavily secured building in Antwerp's famed Diamond District.

To accomplish this theft, the thieves had to enter the building undetected (a difficult task in one of the world's most heavily monitored and policed neighborhoods), open the vault and the safe-deposit boxes within, then escape unnoticed with many pounds of equipment and loot. Police apprehended some of the suspected thieves -- members of a ring of jewel thieves from Turin -- but the stolen materials were never recovered.

Flawless reads a bit like a thriller and a spy novel combined and I would recommend it to anyone interested in crime writing, whether it be fiction or non-fiction.

-Paul

Bad Blood: Freedom and Death in the White Mountains

For those who enjoy reading true crime drama, Casey Sherman's Bad Blood: Freedom and Death in the White Mountains is a fair, but gritty account of events that took place in May 2007 here in New Hampshire.

When three very different men came together on a country road in Franconia a violent series of events played out leaving two men dead, one a policeman, the other a young man from a well known local family.  Both men knew each other and were part of the same community.

The third man involved in the violence, who was exonerated of charges by the Attorney General the following day, turned out to be a "loose cannon" by anyone's definition.  He often threatened to shoot people.  One of his favorite sayings was he'd give you a "third eye."  At the crime scene, he bragged about how many people he'd killed in his life, threatened early by-standers who came to see what was happening, and had to be told several times by the first police officer on the scene to drop the gun he held.  It was later learned he was taking over 20 prescription drugs at the time.

Sherman gives the reader all sides of the story as well as the reaction of the community.  The account of this unfortunate event is both disturbing and compelling in its insight into human nature.  Adult content and some inappropriate language in quotations.

-Jennifer

Provenance

If you like mysteries, police dramas, art history, and international intrigue, you will love Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo.

From the mid 1980s to 1990s a con man and pathological liar named John Drewe, together with the initially unsuspecting artist John Myatt, flooded the art market with hundreds of fake works of modern art. Drewe took his scams to a new level by seeding the archives of numerous museums with forged documents that provided Myatt’s forgeries with apparently solid records of ownership – a prerequisite for the successful sale of art work among collectors and museums. Drewe made a small fortune. His “friend” Myatt, less so. Then things started to unravel for them.

This book reads like a well paced work of suspense fiction, but is in fact the true account of one of the 20th century’s greatest art frauds. Apparently, there is a major motion picture in the works, so this should become a popular book!

If I had to come up with one criticism of the book, it would be that there are no photos (either of the forged work or of the forgers). Not a big deal, since Myatt has since found success as a legitimate painter of works in the style of the masters and has a web site!

-Paul