“CHARLESGATE CONFIDENTIAL is terrific” – Stephen King A sharp and funny tale of a daring art heist gone wrong—inspired by the same real-life, still-unsolved crime depicted in the Netflix hit series “This Is A Robbery.” A group of criminals in 1946 pull off the heist of the century, stealing a dozen priceless works of art from a Boston museum. But while the thieves get caught, the art is never … while the thieves get caught, the art is never found. Forty years later, the last surviving thief gets out of jail and goes hunting for the loot, involving some innocent college students in his dangerous plan – and thirty years after that, in the present day, the former college kids, now all grown up, are drawn back into danger as the still-missing art tempts a deadly new generation of treasure hunters. A breathtakingly clever, twist-filled narrative that moves from 1946 to 1988 to 2014 and back again, CHARLESGATE CONFIDENTIAL establishes Scott Von Doviak as a storyteller of the first order, and will leave you guessing until the very last page.
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Charlesgate Confidential is terrific. A fun machine…the white-knuckle kind.
Charlesgate Confidential is a riveting tale, a hard-boiled art heist worthy of Dashiell Hammett in his prime.
Charlesgate Chronicles by Scott Von Doviak
This is a great story! Scott Von Doviak has used the real-life unsolved 1990 theft of $500 million worth of art masterpieces from the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Mass. to tell his own version that keeps you hooked until the last page.
Von Doviak’s version of the crime is set in 1946, when three low-life hustlers decide to hold up an underworld poker game in the Charlesgate building, a once posh 19th century Boston hotel. The building, which becomes a significant character in the story, has fallen on hard times, like its current inhabitants. Over the years of the novel, it morphs from a flophouse into a co-ed college dormitory and then an upscale condo complex.
The poker heist doesn’t go well and the two brothers, Jake and Shane Devlin, and their cousin, Joey Cahill, soon find themselves at the mercy of the mobster boss who intends to use them as expendables in the robbery of the century at the Gardner Museum.
Fast forward to the mid-1980s when the Charlesgate is now a coed dorm for Emerson College. An aspiring journalist, Tommy Donnelly, volunteers to write an article for the school newspaper about the checkered past of the building, while at the same time dreaming about love-making with Jackie St. John, who lives down the hall. In his pursuit of interesting, hopefully true, tales of the building he begins uncovering a wealth of material about strange happenings in the Charlesgate.
Fast forward again to 2014, when the Charlesgate has just been remodeled into an exclusive condo complex where a real estate agent selling a unit has just been murdered, and her complete set of keys stolen. Two of Boston’s finest, Detectives Martin Coleman and Ed Carnahan, respond, and one of them make contact with Jackie St. John, who is now a new condo owner.
From this point on the story cycles from 1946 to 1986 to 2014 and repeat, weaving the lives of all the characters together as the story unfolds. Underlying it all is the quest for the $5,000,000 reward for the return of the stolen art of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, Manet, and others, a total of 34 masterpieces. Not inconsequential to the mystery is the Boston Redsox pursuit of a World Series Championship during the ensuing 68 years.
What’s so good about this story is the way the author cycles back and forth through the decades without losing momentum. There is no lull in any chapter as you often find in novels structured this way.
If you’re human you already know the outcome of the art heist and the travails of the Redsox. What is so compelling is the way the lives of people separated by almost 70 years are woven together. And what you don’t know is whether Tommy Donnelly and Jackie St. John will ever find love.
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To quote from famous literature (which this book does a lot, and very enjoyably), “Please, sir, I want some more.”