A besieged socialite, her super-hot grandson, and a house-cleaner plan an art heist and try to save a Van Gogh legacy.
Guest review by Adam H. Douglas
When most people hear the name “Van Gogh,” they typically think only of Vincent, the famous artist, but know nothing about his sister-in-law, Johanna “Jo” van Gogh-Bonger.
Jo was a widow at twenty-nine, after her husband Theo, Vincent’s brother, died at only 33 years. She was left with an infant son and roughly three hundred seemingly worthless paintings by her brother-in-law. Rather than let his work molder in an attic, Jo spent the rest of her life engineering his posthumous fame. She cultivated critics, staged exhibitions, and eventually published his private letters.
In the process, Jo built the market that still prices a single Van Gogh in the tens of millions today. Internationally bestselling author Jo Piazza stumbled onto Jo’s story secondhand, from a friend researching his own book on color, and immediately recognized its potential.
In the notes at the end of the book, Piazza explains how she saw a woman written out of the very legend she created, and decided that story was, in her own words, “ripe for a feminist novel,” which eventually became the art-heist-slash-historical hybrid “The Parisian Heist.”
Paris Conspiracy
The framework of “Heist” toggles between two timelines. In 1990s Paris, Emma, a broke American art student still nursing the effects of a bad affair with her manipulative professor, cleans apartments to make ends meet. That includes the penthouse of Stella Swanson, an elderly, seemingly frail widow of an art-dealing tycoon.
Stella turns out to be sharper and more purposeful than she lets on. Cut out of her husband’s estate by his vindictive son and threatened with institutionalization, Stella recruits Emma—along with Emma’s roommates and Stella’s own devastatingly charming step-grandson, Matthew—into a scheme to reclaim what’s hers.
That plan requires infiltrating the Swanson family’s inner sanctum even as it draws Emma into a romance with the very family she’s conspiring against.
Woven through this is the story of Claire, a nineteenth-century Parisian prostitute who saves Jo van Gogh from an assault one night and becomes her closest confidante. Jo, however, doesn’t know that her late husband, Theo Van Gogh, used to hire Claire for her services. The two became close, and Theo ends up begging Claire on his deathbed to watch over his wife after he’s gone.
Claire evolves into Jo’s business partner in all but title, doing things like bookkeeping, damage control, and strategy, while Jo focuses on a public campaign to make Vincent famous.
The connective tissue between the two timelines turns out to be genealogical: Claire is Stella’s grandmother, and a long-lost Van Gogh Sunflowers painting passed down through the family becomes the linchpin of Stella’s plan.
Now all the heist team has to do is survive the attempt and make sure no one lands in jail or an asylum along the way.
Art History Lesson
Piazza is clearly a novelist drawn to reinvention, starting with the chick-lit rom-com “Love Rehab” back in 2013 and moving since through political drama, workplace satire, and feminist historical fiction.
“The Parisian Heist” continues that restlessness, delving into art history far more than the title might suggest.
Piazza explains in her endnotes that Jo’s efforts to transform Vincent from a nobody artist to a modern genius was the spark for the book. The chapters are frequently dense with art-world trivia, tales, and anecdotes. Unfortunately, that density often drags on the plot, especially for readers hoping for a propulsive heist novel rather than an art-history lecture with a grievance to air.
Feminist Trope-o-Rama
Piazza is unapologetically feminist, but the didacticism she injects into the book drifts frequently into eye-rolling territory.
In one representative passage, Emma checks off four separate tropes within a single page: “What woman today is completely safe?” … “Look at nearly any wall label next to a painting of a young woman in a museum, and part of the text will usually explain how it scandalized men” … “You have to wander through many, many galleries just to stumble onto the few women artists here” … “I greet Morisot’s woman rocking a cradle with the same dreamy and exhausted expression of every new mother I’ve ever met.”
Yeesh, we get it already.
That fervent commitment to a modern feminist lens also leans on the well-worn trope of the noble prostitute: intelligent and principled, maligned by a system that has left her no other options. Claire does work she would never choose if only this unjust world offered her the choices she deserved.
This is a good example of the novel’s tendency to smooth over reality in service of its thesis. Apart from avoiding extreme privation, is there anything genuinely redemptive about street-level sex work during the Second Industrial Revolution?
In the story, Theo visited Claire as a client, and somehow the relationship sparked a devotion deep enough to reroute the rest of her life toward Jo van Gogh. Claire also conveniently and miraculously avoids the syphilis that eventually devoured Theo’s brain.
Ideological Revisionism?
Piazza portrays Jo as meek and easily steamrolled when she first tries to drum up interest in Vincent’s work, mocked and dismissed by the art establishment: “always with men, always older than the two of us by decades.”
In her postscript, Piazza explains that she invented the fictional Claire “because it felt unfair to inhabit the interior life of a real historical woman [referring to Jo].” You might wonder if both women sharing the same first name was also a factor.
In light of that statement, it’s interesting how Piazza endows Theo’s real-life widow with a startlingly melodramatic streak that borders on outright mental illness. Claire describes how “Jo often screams in the middle of the night…crying out: ‘The sadness will last forever,'” an echo of Vincent’s dying words.
“It happens again and again,” Claire laments, “but in the morning she never remembers.”
Or, at her husband’s grave, Claire watches Jo “whispering into the dirt, ‘Oh darling, my darling, if only I could think that your spirit is still with us… What will become of me now?'” This interpretation is at odds with most historical accounts, which saw Jo van Gogh-Bonger as a resilient, pragmatic, and emotionally strong woman, hardly prone to melodrama. For such a capable figure, why inject such instability?
Nowhere in the book does Piazza mention Goupil & Cie, one of the wealthiest and most successful art dealerships in Europe, built and run in part by two of Vincent’s own uncles. Theo managed their Paris gallery, which is almost certainly where Jo actually learned the tools of the trade she later wielded on Vincent’s behalf.
Perhaps acknowledging these facts would mean crediting the men in Jo’s life for part of her education and success, and thereby diluting the trope. How inconvenient.
In the final analysis, “The Parisian Heist” tries to merge several sub-genres at once: rom-com, art-world thriller, and feminist redemptive historical fiction. And it doesn’t succeed at any of them.
“The Parisian Heist” by Jo Piazza
Dutton, July 14, 2026
Hardcover, 416 pages
(Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash)