Portrait of a Thief

There are two major issues with this book. The first is the characters. They do not have enough differentiating them - in particular, their characterization and their voices, but also in background. What makes the best heist thrillers exciting is a bunch of characters coming from different places, different motivations and often having different goals. There is none of that here - all of these characters are elite college students, all coming from families with high expectations, who all have a similar motivation of returning a piece of their ancestral history to its home. That leaves the story with little friction or dissonance to make things exciting to read, and on top of it there is no distinctive voice to any of them.

Which leads me to the second problem - the prose style. For a heist book, the prose here is very....sleepy. Dreamy, if I'm being generous. It's pretty, at first, but it becomes a droning one-note very quickly. The pace never picks up to create any sense of urgency, and descriptions are often so repetitive that they evoke very little. So while I wanted to stay in it at least to the first of five heists, by the time I got to it, I was mostly skimming. At which point, I realized I had to give up.

This is a pretty big bummer. I was hoping for something exciting, slick and fun. But on top of the very unrealistic premise (five students with zero experience get randomly chosen by a company to conduct a huge complicated heist?? in what universe??), which I was initially willing to let slide as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, this book doesn't have much else to offer in terms of characters or tension.