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    A Beautiful Crime: A Novel
    A Beautiful Crime: A Novel
    A Beautiful Crime: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    A Beautiful Crime: A Novel

    Written by Christopher Bollen

    Narrated by Tim Paige

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist | O Magazine Best Book of the Year

    “A compelling take on the eternal question of how good people morph into criminals. Terrific.”—People, Book of the Week

    From the author of The Destroyers comes an ""intricately plotted and elegantly structured"" (Newsday) story of intrigue and deception, set in contemporary Venice and featuring a young American couple who have set their sights on a risky con.

    When Nick Brink and his boyfriend Clay Guillory meet up on the Grand Canal in Venice, they have a plan in mind—and it doesn’t involve a vacation. Nick and Clay are running away from their turbulent lives in New York City, each desperate for a happier, freer future someplace else. Their method of escape? Selling a collection of counterfeit antiques to a brash, unsuspecting American living out his retirement years in a grand palazzo. With Clay’s smarts and Nick’s charm, their scheme is sure to succeed.

    As it turns out, tricking a millionaire out of money isn’t as easy as it seems, especially when Clay and Nick let greed get the best of them. As Nick falls under the spell of the city’s decrepit magic, Clay comes to terms with personal loss and the price of letting go of the past. Their future awaits, but it is built on disastrous deceits, and more than one life stands in the way of their dreams.

    A Beautiful Crime is a twisty grifter novel with a thriller running through its veins. But it is also a meditation on love, class, race, sexuality, and the legacy of bohemian culture. Tacking between Venice’s soaring aesthetic beauty and its imminent tourist-riddled collapse, Bollen delivers a ""brilliantly conceived international crime story"" (Good Morning America).

    Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 28, 2020
    ISBN9780062931016
    Author

    Christopher Bollen

    Christopher Bollen is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Lost Americans, A Beautiful Crime, The Destroyers, Orient, and Lightning People. He is a frequent contributor to a number of publications, including Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and Interview. He lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for A Beautiful Crime

    3.5/5

    35 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Great escape to Venezia. I actually felt like I was there. I want to see this movie!!!
    • 4/5
      Since reading Orient a few years ago, I’ve kept Christopher Bollen on my radar. His narrative style is oblique, but highly personal and particular. He goes into detail, but not enough for it to become repetitive and boring. The opening scene in this novel is quite effective - it’s a short con that’s really a test to see if Nick can pull off the long one. It’s a little nail-biter once we come to the end, but it’s a thing of beauty as far as cons go. I know we should all deplore them as terrible cheats and liars, but successful con artists have a strange place in the human heart. We want to believe that their victims deserved it somehow; that they walked into the trap or fell for the most blatant lies when we know that we would probably do the same. I think we also want to reward such brazenness because it’s so skillful and something 90% of us just couldn’t imagine doing or be good at if we tried. So that’s our set-up, Nick and Clay are here to deprive some poor fool of his money.But not so fast. Is our victim really deserving? It takes a while to get to that part, but when it comes, I wasn’t convinced and thought Clay was being a bit of a jerk and certainly childish. And given that we don’t see the relationship much from Richard West’s POV it’s hard to say his treatment of Clay was so vicious. We also don’t get to see far into Clay’s relationship with van der Haar and whether he wormed his way into the old Queen’s heart just to game an inheritance. He is masterminding the long con on West so it’s likely, but unproven. Overall Nick comes across as more sympathetic than does Clay, although he seems a natural swindler more than Clay. Venice itself stands out as a character and one that’s being slowly strangled. A sub-current in the story is that of Venice itself and how it’s relentlessly turning into Disneyland. There are fewer and fewer actual residents of the city because no one can afford to say, be a dentist or run a dry-cleaner because so many of the city dwellers have left because of the tourist onslaught. It’s a vicious cycle - how can you live anywhere without grocery stores or veterinarians? How can you stand the taxes and the crowding and the noise? So many people turned their homes into B&Bs or vacation rentals and left for the mainland. Anyone hanging on has to put up with too many people and too few services. In the book the latest Mayor is blamed as a corrupt politician (redundant I know) who uses bribery as a way to bulldoze and raze homes and businesses and build hotels and mask shops. It ends sort of oddly. Nick has to run on the heels of a violent fight with West and the resulting probable charges of attempted murder. The plot to sell the toothpick pallazzo Il Domitorio fell through because West saw Clay didn’t have clear title to it and set a trap to get both of them on fraud. Because West’s assistant saw he was being used and got really mad, he went ahead to warn Clay that he shouldn’t show up for the sale meeting. Since he actually didn’t go through with it, Clay gets to hang onto his half-ownership out of prison. Eventually he catches up with Nick who is on the remotest island you can be on and still be in Italy. Will they live happily ever after? Most likely not, but it's a nice dream. I was always worried that Nick would end up with the short end of the stick and was happy when he asked Clay how exactly Nick would benefit financially if absolutely everything was in Clay's name. This goes for the silver and the house. Clay never offers to open a Swiss Bank Account for Nick, so I don't think he ever intended to share and I think Nick knows that now. But they're basically all the other has and so...Bollen writes that Clay’s role as an intern at the Guggenheim in Venice is based on his own experience being one. His love of the museum, the city and his time there is palpable and enviable. I’m not sure Venice can live up to its past so it’s nice to have it encapsulated here. Some terrific writing -“As a teenager, Nick feared he would eventually become something like his quietly miserable father, fixing radios in a Dayton basement. Then Nick feared he would turn into a version of his unhappy, Ohio-trapped sister. In New York, he worried he’d end up whispered about like this young man for his behavior around older men. Nick’s entire biography could be summed up by the people he feared he’d become.” p 36“Like most zillionaires, West didn’t want to be remembered for how he’d earned his money but for how he spent it. Many lives might have been ruined in the amassing of his wealth, but now he was bent on uplifting lives by means of culture and taste.” p 134
    • 3/5
      Very slow-paced book, set in NYC and Venice.
    • 5/5
      This is an intelligent, well-written and well-paced thriller. It is the story of two young gay men from New York City, one black the other white, with most of the action set in Venice. The author's Epilogue explains how he achieved verisimilitude in describing the art world and the expat world in Venice, as well as in depicting the city's confusing streets, plazas and bridges.The young men both come from relationships with older men, one romantic, the other more care giving. Antique silver brings the two young men together, one a seller the other an expert/appraiser. The older men are gone, and the two become lovers and then schemers.Page one is a tantalizing Prologue describing a killed man " . . . (lying) crumpled and bleeding. He's been dead for only a few seconds. . . . The killer is making a run for the exit." Who is the dead man? Who is the killer? These questions are with us until very near the end of the book.In fact, the book has two murders and one attempted murder. Brilliantly, the author places moral deficiencies more on the victims than the perpetrators. The reader works to sort that out. The two young men live happily ever after - or do they? A great read.