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.
Continue reading Jo Piazza’s “The Parisian Heist”: Cramming Feminism Into Art Frames
