Review: Heist Society by Ally Carter

Update!  The Heist Society movie characters will be aged up.  Check out Ally's response to this decision here. 

When Katarina Bishop was three, her parents took her to the Louvre...to case it. For her seventh birthday, Katarina and her Uncle Eddie traveled to Austria...to steal the crown jewels. When Kat turned fifteen, she planned a con of her own, scamming her way into the best boarding school in the country, determined to leave the family business behind. Unfortunately, leaving "the life" for a normal life proves harder than she'd expected.


Soon, Kat's friend and former co-conspirator, Hale, appears out of nowhere to bring her back into the world she tried so hard to escape. But he has good reason: a powerful mobster's art collection has been stolen, and he wants it returned. Only a master thief could have pulled this job, and Kat's father isn't just on the suspect list, he is the list. Caught between Interpol and a far more deadly enemy, Kat's dad needs her help. For Kat there is only one solution: track down the paintings and steal them back. So what if it's a spectacularly impossible job? She's got two weeks, a teenage crew, and hopefully just enough talent to pull off the biggest heist in her family's (very crooked) history and, with any luck, steal her life back along the way.

What a fantastic book!!   I really enjoyed Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls Series, but this book blew them away.  Heist Society is Ocean's Eleven/Mission Impossible for teens.  With all the elements that I love in a book: action, adventure, plot twists, and a little romance scattered throughout the pages, I could not put this book down.  Kat is a brilliant, witty, and determined girl, who will do anything to save her father from the clutches of an evil thief named Arturo Taccone.   "Arturo Taccone laughed softly, but there was something odd about the sound.  As if it too had been stolen from its rightful owner."  This time it was Taccone who had been stolen from.  As Kat's father is the assumed thief, Kat has two weeks to re-steal the priceless paintings, or Taccone will go after her him, and that's not something to be taken lightly.  With the help of her "family", a group of thieving teens (and two really cute boys), Kat begins to plan the heist of her life, and maybe find out some important truths along the way.  Go read this book!

Heist Society has been picked up for a movie!  Check it out here.

• Sexual Content: Mild
• Profanity:  None
• Violence:  None
• Other Notables:  Kat's entire family are theives.

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