A Beautiful Crime

Starred review from November 11, 2019
At the start of this stunning crime novel from Bollen (The Destroyers), 25-year-old Nicholas Brink leaves his lover and life in New York City to meet his new boyfriend, Clay Guillory, in Venice. There, the two young men set in motion a supposedly foolproof con to unload counterfeit silver on Richard Forsyth West, a charming, wealthy ex-pat American for whom Clay once worked and who’s immersed in Venice’s renovation. Clay inherited the silver from his last partner, the much older Freddy van der Haar. The sale will allow Clay to pay off debts incurred while caring for Freddy and allow the couple a fresh start. While the swindle fuels the plot, the story gains its strength from its look at gay romance and how individuals become a couple, as well as its view of shabby yet chic Venice, with its “fugitive magic” that lacks “the reality check of poverty and ugliness and ordinary struggles.” Clay and Nick grapple with their morals and greed while remaining appealing. Readers will easily root for them to get away with the con. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

January 10, 2020

In his popular crime novels (e.g., Orient), Bollen offers first-rate entertainment that features attractive young people, beautiful locations, contentious families, fabulous wealth, lies and deceit, friendship and passion, and dirty deeds. This enjoyable new work is set in the gorgeous city of Venice, and the "beautiful crime" of the title involves family silver and a nasty piece of work named Richard Forsyth West, an affluent businessman who richly deserves the payback he receives in the final pages. The novel is really about love, though, with Bollen actually telling two love stories. The first centers on Clay Guillory, a young man who falls for an older, wealthy gentleman, Freddy van der Haar, whom he nurses affectionately during the long, final stages of a terminal illness. No one in Freddy's family can believe this is anything more than gold-digging, but the relationship is revealed to be tender and authentic. The second involves Clay and his new boyfriend, Nick Brink, a relationship that begins as the two become partners in crime but develops into something deeper.

VERDICT Bollen links each of the two narratives in significant ways to the criminal adventure to offer skillfully wrought crime fiction plumbing LGBTQ romance and the meaning of love.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
André Aciman meets Patricia Highsmith in this satisfying exercise in literary crime. "No mythical city should be judged by its airport." So we read as 25-year-old Nicholas Brink, an Ohioan by way of New York, lands in Venice in a "Gobi of concrete." Nick is cut out for finer things, and he has come to Venice to take his part in a con game of his own devising. Bollen (The Destroyers, 2017, etc.) skillfully lets the details out bit by bit: We learn on one page that he has a boyfriend, Clay Guillory, on another that Clay is an Italian speaker who knows Venice well, on still another that Clay is an African American who, Nick hopes, will find the city of Othello less ethnically fraught than a white America that sees Clay "as a blur of black skin." The crime is delicious, a sale of counterfeit antiques to an American expat who has more money than he knows what to do with. As must happen in stories of this sort, mistakes are made, and Nick, who presents himself as the affable good guy, gets greedy--and, Clay protests, "Getting greedy is what will get us into trouble." Instead of selling a bunch of old silver and such, Nick wants to sell a whole palazzo that only partly belongs to Clay by virtue of a friendship with a now-deceased bohemian artist--only partly, the rest being tied up in a family squabble of epically Venetian proportions. Cons turn into countercons as a private investigator-cum-strongman turns up, and when that happens, Bollen's relatively gentle game of cat and mouse takes a bloody turn that's not entirely unexpected. Clay's warning to Nick turns out to be exactly right, as Nick sheds any vestigial boyishness in the course of a would-be swindle that goes exactly wrong. Fans of crime fiction will delight in this marriage of knowing aestheticism and old-fashioned mayhem.

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Narrator Tim Paige captures the heightened emotions of two protagonists in this literary thriller set in Venice. Twenty-five-year old Nick and his boyfriend, Clay, have a simple plan: to scam an American retiree out of enough money to fund their fresh start. But as they struggle to relinquish their pasts, the scam, and their lives, begin to spiral out of control. Paige's narration carries the yearning and recklessness of two people caught up in each other and a city. His tone mellows during tender moments between them and becomes frenzied during the tense scenes. His voicing of secondary characters is not as good--his Italian, American, and British accents are inconsistent. Even so, listeners will find this fresh and surprising audiobook hard to put down. L.S. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

December 1, 2019
Twenty-five-year-old Nick Brink flies to Venice to rendezvous with his lover, 27-year-old Clay Guillory. No, they're not on vacation; instead, they plan to scam an American zillionaire named Richard West, who is an avid collector. The two young men have in their possession five silver objects that had belonged to a man with a celebrated last name, van der Haar, an ancient New York family with whom West is obsessed. Nick and Clay know that the collector is dead set on acquiring the silver objects as much for their provenance as for their collectibility. What West doesn't know is that the objects are forgeries, which Nick and Clay are passing off as originals. To their delight, the ruse works, and they find themselves 750,000 Euros richer. But is that enough? A compelling read with appealing characters, Bollen's novel is deftly paced and plotted with a beautifully realized setting that brings Venice to vivid life. The result is a treat for both crime-fiction fans and armchair travelers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)