Prince of Thieves » (Reprint)

Chuck Hogan abandoned his career as a video store clerk when his first novel, The Standoff, became a bestseller and was translated into fourteen international editions. His most recent novel, Prince of Thieves, was awarded the Hammett Prize for excellence in crime writing, and is being made into a major motion picture by Warner Brothers. He lives with his family in Massachusetts.

The men wear masks. Their guns are drawn on the bank manager. She nervously recites the alarm code, and the tumblers within the huge vault fall. The timing and execution are brilliant. It could be the perfect heist. But as the huge sum of cash is stolen, so too is one man's heart -- and that man is the Prince of Thieves... Charlestown, a blue-collar Boston neighborhood, produces more bank robbers and armored car thieves than any square mile in the world. In this gripping, intricately plotted thriller, Claire Keesey, the branch manager for a Boston bank and one of an influx of young professionals chipping away at the neighborhood's insularity, is taken hostage during a robbery. She is released, but Doug MacRay, the brains behind the tough, tight-knit crew of thieves, can't get her out of his mind. Tracking her down without his mask and gun, Doug introduces himself, and as soon as he and Claire meet, their mutual attraction is undeniable -- as are the risks of a relationship.

Meanwhile, Doug's crew pulls off another audacious, meticulously planned job. Frustrated by their ingenuity and brazen ambition, FBI Agent Adam Frawley begins to zero in on Doug and his pals -- and against his own better judgment, he, too, develops more than a professional interest in Claire.

Under pressure from Frawley's ever-closer investigation, Doug imagines a life for himself away from bank robberies and Charlestown. But before that can happen, the crew learns that there may be a way to rob Boston's venerable baseball stadium, Fenway Park. It's a magnificently dangerous and utterly irresistible opportunity -- yet for Doug, pursuing his former hostage may be the most dangerous act of all...

Chuck Hogan's brash tale of four men -- thieves, rivals, friends -- being hunted through the streets of Boston by a tenacious FBI agent, and the woman who may destroy them all, is a spectacular, stylish, heart-pounding thriller.

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

Between crimes, we move to the great strength of the novel: Hogan's portrait of four criminals and their world. Doug is the brains of the gang: He plots robberies the way other ambitious young men plot corporate takeovers. He wants out of Charlestown, but he can never quite resist one last score. He and the others bitterly resent the yuppies and developers who are changing their world. Hogan's sharp, often bawdy dialogue, his scenes of the four friends alternating between affection, suspicion and fury at one another; his sketches of their long-suffering mothers and girlfriends; his glimpse of the old mob chief who lurks in the background -- are all first-rate.