The Hidden Things

June 10, 2019
A home-security video shows 14-year-old Carly Liddell, the heroine of this suspenseful, if workmanlike, thriller from Mason (Monday’s Lie), successfully fighting off an intruder who forced his way into her family’s suburban home. The day after the incident, the video is uploaded to YouTube and becomes a viral hit. The video also shows the corner of a painting hanging in the family foyer—17th-century Dutch master Govaert Flinck’s Landscape with Obelisk, part of the haul from the infamous heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The author builds tension by carefully doling out the story of how John Cooper, Carly’s new stepfather, came to possess the stolen painting. Meanwhile, John must contend with two people who recognize the painting in the video and have scores to settle with him. The danger the increasingly unlikable John doesn’t count on, however, is the one represented by the whip-smart, courageous Carly—hands down, the best part of the book. Those with an interest in the real-life museum theft may want to check this one out. Agent: Amy Moore-Benson, AMB Literary Management.

Starred review from July 1, 2019
The incident in which 14-year-old Carly Liddell repelled an attacker in the foyer of her own home was recorded by a camera installed by her stepfather, John Cooper. The recording helped police arrest the assailant and then went viral, ending Cooper's carefully constructed life because it showed part of a painting by seventeenth-century artist Govaert Flinck, which was stolen from a Boston art museum. Jonathan Spera, Cooper's real name, had come upon the painting in the detritus left by his late father. Four years earlier, Spera's attempt to sell the painting to a wealthy couple had gone terribly wrong, leaving bodies behind while Spera escaped with the painting. Now people involved in that aborted sale have recognized the painting and are coming after it, and Spera. Mason, lauded for her debut Three Graves Full (2013), as well as for Monday's Lie (2015), is wonderfully adept at creating multifaceted characters in emotionally complex relationships. Little black and white for these characters?just multiple shades of gray, causing readers to temper their allegiances as the plot thunders to its conclusion. Masterfully nuanced crime fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)