Deliciously diabolical. . . . What makes the crime in Bollen’s stylish new novel so beautiful is that the perps’ plan works out even better than they’d hoped—at least for a while. . . . A skilled purveyor of suspense. . . . Bollen’s wit sparkles on almost every page." — Washington Post
“Bollen populates this utterly transporting novel with elegant, mysterious and complicated characters worthy of Patricia Highsmith, and he delivers hard-boiled film-noir moments amidst the sensual decadence of a Visconti film. But somehow, masterfully, while his sexy thrilling story pulls you ever forward, in the end it’s Bollen’s gorgeous writing that will leave you truly breathless. This is a first class trip to Venice with an insider at your side taking you far beyond the tourist destinations, but be careful who you’re with when you wander alongside that narrow canal and down that charming alleyway.” — Kevin Kwan, author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy
“Elegant.” — New York Times Book Review
“Entrancing. . . . Patricia Highsmith by way of Alan Hollinghurst: morally gray, utterly mesmerizing, and intensely erotic. Beginning with his 2011 debut, Lightning People , Bollen has displayed a fascination with how power works in America; his newest is an astute meditation on the ways financial inequality and racism affect one’s sense of identity and interactions with others—including romantic partners.” — Alexander Chee, O: The Oprah Magazine
“Stylish. . . a compelling take on the eternal question of how good people morph into criminals. Terrific.” — People, Book of the Week
“A brilliantly conceived international crime story with two complex, queer characters at its center. If you never thought the world of counterfeit antiques could keep you on the edge of your seat, think again. It’s as complex and engrossing as ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ but don’t be surprised when in the midst of the intrigue, the story breaks your heart. We wanted to follow these characters over and around the canals of Venice to see where they’d end up next.” — Good Morning America
"Fantastic." — Zadie Smith
“Intricately plotted and elegantly structured…. Bollen captures Venice in all its decadence, art-rich history and ineluctable decay…. His language is simultaneously inviting and forbidding — accessible, playful, and then suddenly, shockingly brilliant.… What makes A Beautiful Crime work so well is how much empathy Bollen affords his characters.” — Newsday
“Fans of Patricia Highsmith's subtly insidious mysteries will find dark delight in this caper by the talented Mr. Bollen.” — Oprah.com
“A smart, fast-paced, Highsmith-y novel full of con men, crumbling palazzos, and sentences so sharp they’ll cut you. It made me want to pack a bag and flee to Venice, while looking over my shoulder the whole way.”David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl
“Like Venice itself, A Beautiful Crime is full of twists and shadows and intrigue—an irresistible and stylish novel in which I found myself thrillingly lost. A master of suspense, Bollen seduces the reader not with tricks, but with beguiling, multi-layered main characters whose flaws are as compelling and relatable as their virtues. I loved every moment in their company.” — Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
“Extraordinary. A razor wrapped in silk, a cocktail spiked with poison—a novel both sophisticated and savage, inviting and dangerous. Death in Venice? You have no idea.” — A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window
“With its delicate plotting, its fast-moving and elegantly transparent prose-not to mention a setting that for once is not rendered with a litany of platitudes-A Beautiful Crime is a novel designed to activate the pleasure principle-and, as with Bollen's own erotically charged characters, it does so.” — Lawrence Osborne
"André Aciman meets Patricia Highsmith in this satisfying exercise in literary crime… Fans of crime fiction will delight in this marriage of knowing aestheticism and old-fashioned mayhem.” — Kirkus , starred review
“Stunning.” — Publishers Weekly , starred review
“A thrilling story of passion and deception… Can two good people pull off a con full of deceit and fraud? It’s a question that persists all the way to the book’s end, maintaining an incessant, fearsome tension, like holding your breath underwater…. Like the city itself, A Beautiful Crime is worth losing yourself in.” — Chika Gujarathi , Bookpage, starred review
“First-rate entertainment.” — Library Journal
"Compelling. . . deftly paced and plotted with a beautifully realized setting that brings Venice to vivid life." — Booklist
“Haunting, atmospheric, and enigmatic.” — Crimereads
A smart, fast-paced, Highsmith-y novel full of con men, crumbling palazzos, and sentences so sharp they’ll cut you. It made me want to pack a bag and flee to Venice, while looking over my shoulder the whole way.”
Like Venice itself, A Beautiful Crime is full of twists and shadows and intrigue – an irresistible and stylish novel in which I found myself thrillingly lost. A master of suspense, Bollen seduces the reader not with tricks, but with beguiling, multi-layered main characters whose flaws are as compelling and relatable as their virtues. I loved every moment in their company.
Elegant.”
New York Times Book Review
Fans of Patricia Highsmith's subtly insidious mysteries will find dark delight in this caper by the talented Mr. Bollen.
Bollen populates this utterly transporting novel with elegant, mysterious and complicated characters worthy of Patricia Highsmith, and he delivers hard-boiled film-noir moments amidst the sensual decadence of a Visconti film. But somehow, masterfully, while his sexy thrilling story pulls you ever forward, in the end it’s Bollen’s gorgeous writing that will leave you truly breathless. This is a first class trip to Venice with an insider at your side taking you far beyond the tourist destinations, but be careful who you’re with when you wander alongside that narrow canal and down that charming alleyway.
A brilliantly conceived international crime story with two complex, queer characters at its center. If you never thought the world of counterfeit antiques could keep you on the edge of your seat, think again. It’s as complex and engrossing as ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ but don’t be surprised when in the midst of the intrigue, the story breaks your heart. We wanted to follow these characters over and around the canals of Venice to see where they’d end up next.
Intricately plotted and elegantly structured…. Bollen captures Venice in all its decadence, art-rich history and ineluctable decay…. His language is simultaneously inviting and forbidding — accessible, playful, and then suddenly, shockingly brilliant.… What makes A Beautiful Crime work so well is how much empathy Bollen affords his characters.”
Deliciously diabolical…What makes the crime in Bollen’s stylish new novel so beautiful is that the perps’ plan works out even better than they’d hoped—at least for a while…A skilled purveyor of suspense…Bollen’s wit sparkles on almost every page."
Extraordinary. A razor wrapped in silk, a cocktail spiked with poison — a novel both sophisticated and savage, inviting and dangerous. Death in Venice? You have no idea.
★ 11/11/2019
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. (Jan.)
"Fantastic."
Deliciously diabolical…What makes the crime in Bollen’s stylish new novel so beautiful is that the perps’ plan works out even better than they’d hoped—at least for a while…A skilled purveyor of suspense…Bollen’s wit sparkles on almost every page."
Entrancing…. Patricia Highsmith by way of Alan Hollinghurst: morally gray, utterly mesmerizing, and intensely erotic. Beginning with his 2011 debut, Lightning People , Bollen has displayed a fascination with how power works in America; his newest is an astute meditation on the ways financial inequality and racism affect one’s sense of identity and interactions with others—including romantic partners.
Haunting, atmospheric, and enigmatic.
"Compelling... deftly paced and plotted with a beautifully realized setting that brings Venice to vivid life."
With its delicate plotting, its fast-moving and elegantly transparent prose-not to mention a setting that for once is not rendered with a litany of platitudes-A Beautiful Crime is a novel designed to activate the pleasure principle-and, as with Bollen's own erotically charged characters, it does so.
A thrilling story of passion and deception… Can two good people pull off a con full of deceit and fraud? It’s a question that persists all the way to the book’s end, maintaining an incessant, fearsome tension, like holding your breath underwater…. Like the city itself, A Beautiful Crime is worth losing yourself in.
"Compelling... deftly paced and plotted with a beautifully realized setting that brings Venice to vivid life."
Intricately plotted and elegantly structured…. Bollen captures Venice in all its decadence, art-rich history and ineluctable decay…. His language is simultaneously inviting and forbidding — accessible, playful, and then suddenly, shockingly brilliant.… What makes A Beautiful Crime work so well is how much empathy Bollen affords his characters.”
Bollen's dark, delicious novel … tackles big questions about love and letting go, but never without skimping on style.
A brilliantly conceived international crime story with two complex, queer characters at its center. If you never thought the world of counterfeit antiques could keep you on the edge of your seat, think again. It’s as complex and engrossing as ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ but don’t be surprised when in the midst of the intrigue, the story breaks your heart. We wanted to follow these characters over and around the canals of Venice to see where they’d end up next.
"Compelling... deftly paced and plotted with a beautifully realized setting that brings Venice to vivid life."
A thrilling story of passion and deception… Can two good people pull off a con full of deceit and fraud? It’s a question that persists all the way to the book’s end, maintaining an incessant, fearsome tension, like holding your breath underwater…. Like the city itself, A Beautiful Crime is worth losing yourself in.
Bollen's dark, delicious novel … tackles big questions about love and letting go, but never without skimping on style.
Fans of Patricia Highsmith's subtly insidious mysteries will find dark delight in this caper by the talented Mr. Bollen.
A delicious literary thriller.
The Destroyers is one superb novel, a tightly woven and fast-moving narrative set in beautifully crafted prose. A read-all-night of a book.
Beautiful people visiting glamorous places, being wicked enough to bring Patricia Highsmith to mind. It just isn’t summer without this kind of globe-trotting glamour to read about, especially when most of it is set in the Aegean. Bollen is stylish enough to know what sells.... Escapism, as calculating as it gets.”
New York Times on The Destroyers
Beautiful people visiting glamorous places, being wicked enough to bring Patricia Highsmith to mind. It just isn’t summer without this kind of globe-trotting glamour to read about, especially when most of it is set in the Aegean. Bollen is stylish enough to know what sells.... Escapism, as calculating as it gets.”
01/10/2020
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
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
FEBRUARY 2020 - AudioFile
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
FEBRUARY 2020 - AudioFile
★ 2019-10-14
"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.
