When last we left our hero, author cum thief Charlie Howard, he was leaving Amsterdam to move onto a new city and a new adventure. Not straying too far from his previous European haunt, Charlie has moved onto Paris, where he has a new adventure in novel-writing and thievery.
And this time, Charlie really steps in it in the City of Lights. He gets embroiled in a plot to steal a Picasso painting when he does a reading at a local bookstore. Unfortunately, author Chris Ewan also steps in it a bit: this one's plot is a little too complicated, a little too much of a labyrinth. While I thoroughly enjoyed The Good Thief's Guide to Paris, this second installment in the tales of Charlie Howard, I found myself going back and re-reading parts to figure out what just happened. Maybe it's just my fading attention span. In the end, Charlie wraps it all up, nice and neat. It just takes him a bit of 'esplaining' to do, Lucy.
The best part of the book for me is when Charlie and his agent meeting in person. In the first book, The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam (which I reviewed here), Victoria is just a voice on the phone, albeit an important one. She acts--in Charlie's "real" life and to the reader--as a sounding board for plot points and resolving the plot. Ewan's books are very much the big reveal at the end as to how the case at hand went down. Victoria helps goose that along, and when they "finally" (okay...it's midway in only the SECOND book in the series, so it's not like we've been waiting forever) meet, it's like a 21st Century pairing of Holmes and Watson, except this time Holmes does the book writing.
As in any book I read that has cinematic possibilities, I find myself "casting" the leads. I had a hard time with Charlie Howard, since you don't get a conventional description of what he looks like. The jacket notes sometimes refer to him as "the most disarmingly charming burglar since Cary Grant,"--and they're referring to the role played by the actor in To Catch a Thief, I'm guessing--but he's decidedly not Grant. I think about halfway through this book I decided on Simon Pegg, the actor from Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scotty in the new Star Trek movie. Not movie star handsome by any means, Pegg has the necessary actor chops to pull off someone "disarmingly charming," I think. And let's face it...as you know from reading the books, Charlie--for his own reasons--has someone else pose for the author photo on all of his (fictional) fiction books. As for Victoria, his agent, I'd cast Emily Blunt, who has the right amount of sass and good British looks to be very appealing.
Charlie Howard and author Chris Ewan return in The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas. Luckily, I got gambling money...
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