Among Thieves

November 30, 2009
The real-life 1990 theft of paintings currently valued at half a billion dollars from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and never recovered provides the backdrop for Hosp's overly ambitious art world thriller. In the present day, lawyer Scott Finn thinks he's just helping an old friend, Devon Malley, out of a jam by representing Malley after Malley is arrested for knocking off a high-end clothing store. But when prominent members of Boston's criminal underworld, all of whom have connections to Malley, start turning up dead and show hallmarks of IRA-style torture, Finn realizes he has a much bigger case on his hands. Twenty years earlier, Devon helped rob the Gardner museum along with ex-IRA operative Liam Kilbranish, who has returned to exact revenge on the people he believes hid the paintings. Despite the promising premise, Hosp (Innocence
) quickly gets mired in myriad needless side plots, all of which distract from the allure of the famous heist.

November 1, 2009
The still-unsolved 1990 robbery of the Gardner Museum gets a fictional investigation in a grittily realistic novel from Hosp (Innocence, 2007, etc.).

Street kid turned lawyer Scott Finn doesn't care about artwork or the art of stealing it; he just wants to get enough information about who ratted out a supposedly failsafe insurance scam so he can plea-bargain his client, petty career criminal Devon Malley, out of the penalties usually involved in getting caught in a Newberry Street emporium at midnight with a half-million-dollar armful of designer clothes. Oh, and the attorney also finds himself saddled with a house guest: Devon's tough 14-year-old daughter Sally. Finn's partners, petite recent law-school grad Lissa and hulking former cop Koz, think he's crazy to take on the girl. Finn agrees—except that he remembers when he was a hungry, unwanted kid with nowhere to go. Reasoning it's only for a short time, he minds Sally, but pretty soon everyone's minding him, including a pair of homicidal IRA killers, a couple of detectives, who can't decide whether or not they hate each other, and some federal types who want to solve the art crime of the century. (It turns out Devon was involved.) Hosp also weaves fugitive mobster Whitey Bulger into his fictional tale of a crook in over his head and a lawyer who wants to give a kid a break, but none of the real-life elements make the thin plot any more plausible. The author obviously knows the criminal-justice system, and he flexes that knowledge in passages that merely pad the story line. Hosp has a good eye for character, however, and creates some promising ones that lead to an unusual detective pairing and an unconventional love story. In the end, it's the people, not the plot, who redeem the book.

Only comes alive when the author explores the characters and their relationships.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 15, 2009
In Hosp's third thriller featuring attorney Scott Finn (after "Innocence"), Devon Malley, a small-time thief caught red-handed stealing high-end women's underwear, asks for Finn's help not only with the charges against him but also with his daughter, who's on her own now that he's in jail. Finn reluctantly agrees to help on both counts but realizes that something bigger is going on when the two contacts Malley sends him to for information that might help Malley make a deal with the cops turn up dead. Signs indicate that there is IRA involvement in the murders. Twenty years ago, when $300 million worth of art was stolen from a Boston museum, there were rumours that the IRA was responsible. Now it appears that someone is back looking for the art and that both Malley and Finn and his associates are directly in the killer's line of fire. VERDICT Thriller readers won't be disappointed with the plot twists and surprise ending here, and Scott Finn fans will cheer his return.Lisa Hanson O'Hara, Univ. of Manitoba Libs., Winnipeg

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2009
Hosps latest Scott Finn legal thriller is inspired by the true story of a daring art heist that took place in Boston in 1990. The case, still unsolved, involved the theft of nearly half a million dollars worth of paintings from a museum. In this rendering of the case, Finn, a Boston attorney, stumbles onto the solution to the mystery when his investigations on behalf of a client, a professional crook, take him deep into the citys criminal underworld. Finn, who used to live in that same underworld, must now confront his own personal history on the wrong side of the law, while doing whatever it takes to keep himself alive. The novel is sharply written, and fans of the Martin Scorsese movie The Departed will note a similar feel here: Hosp blurs the line between good and bad, right and wrong. This could be the best of the Finn novels and should draw new readers to the earlier volumes (including Innocence, 2007).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)