Elise Noble's Blog - Posts Tagged "art-theft"

The Girl with the Emerald Ring




Alaric's story will start on August 31st!

Here's a sneak peek...

“Fuck, Cinders—could you have found a more inappropriate surveillance vehicle?”

Alaric McLain watched in the rear-view mirror as Emmy Black closed up behind him in a sleek black Aston Martin. Even with his windows shut, he heard her approach.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Emmy’s voice came through the speakers in his rented Honda SUV. “I’ve had two hours’ sleep, and I’m barely functioning. I could’ve sworn there were more cars in the garage, but all that was left was this and a motorbike.”

“Why didn’t you bring the motorbike?”

“You want me to wear leathers in this temperature? I’d sweat like a pig.” Granted, she had a point there. Early May, and the weather in London had gone haywire. The last two days had been like a cheerleader’s pool party—wet and hot. “Plus there was nowhere to put my rifle.”

Alaric didn’t even try to hide his groan. “You brought a rifle? We’re chasing an art thief, not a bunch of terrorists.”

“You told me that terrorists steal art to finance their activities. ‘It’s not like in the movies,’” she mimicked. “‘Forget Ocean’s Twelve and The Thomas Crown Affair.’”

That was true. Many people shared a romanticised image of art thieves, fostered in no small part by Hollywood. In real life, men who took masterpieces didn’t do it for the challenge or a bet—more often than not, they were hardened criminals after cold, hard cash, and paintings made easier targets than, say, a bank or an armoured truck. Narcotics dealers used them as trading cards. Thieves sold them through fences for a fraction of their true value. Or occasionally, they were stolen to order for people who ran roughshod over others to satisfy their selfish desires.

The police didn’t tend to take art theft seriously either. As long as nobody got hurt and the insurance companies paid up, cultural crimes got put on the back burner. Despite the vast sums of money involved, museum heists got handled by the same squad as a common or garden burglary, and those cops didn’t have the knowledge or the resources to recover stolen paintings.

How did Alaric know all this? Because he’d once been a member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, a small band of investigators and undercover agents who specialised in recovering treasures that would otherwise be lost forever. It had been a surprise transfer, a promotion, and it made a change from dealing with plain ol’ RICO violations. Although the Art Crime Team worked out of Washington, DC, he’d spent much of his time overseas, skulking through the underbelly of society in search of missing cultural artifacts. Many of them made their way to the United States—it was the biggest market in the world for stolen treasures.

One day, Alaric might have masqueraded as a thief, the next, as a middleman or a buyer. Undercover work was his speciality, the ability to hide in plain sight a skill he’d been perfecting since childhood. Colleagues called him a chameleon. His father was a diplomat, and moving from country to country had meant Alaric learned to fit in quickly. He’d lived everywhere from England to Italy to Tanzania to Poland, and as a result, he’d learned more about people than an entire anthropology department. It had been only natural for him to join the CIA after college and take his hobby of being places where he shouldn’t to a whole other level. Bureaucracy and a boss he couldn’t stand led him to quit after four years, but the FBI had welcomed him with open arms. At least, they had until they’d fired him.

Hence today’s little excursion.

The Girl with the Emerald Ring is available to pre-order now:
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