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Face Thief: A Novel
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Face Thief: A Novel
Unavailable
Face Thief: A Novel
Ebook265 pages3 hours

Face Thief: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

Author of the New York Times Notable Book The Boy Who Went Away—winner of the Rome Prize and the British Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize—Eli Gottlieb returns with The Face Thief. A powerfully dark and gripping tale of two men obsessed with one very charismatic, very  damaged woman who’s determined to con from each of them everything she needs to survive, The Face Thief offers highest quality psychological suspense—an ideal follow up to the author’s  masterful  Now You See Him. A writer who can do no wrong, Eli Gottlieb shines with The Face Thief—an effective, provocative, and all around extraordinary novel, written with the literary flair and power of Ian McEwan and rich in its searing portraits of fallible lovers and marriages under siege.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateJan 17, 2012
ISBN9780062100856
Unavailable
Face Thief: A Novel
Author

Eli Gottlieb

Eli Gottlieb's The Boy Who Went Away won the prestigious Rome Prize and the 1998 McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors. It also received extraordinary notices and was a New York Times Notable book. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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Reviews for Face Thief

Rating: 3.3833333 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

30 ratings8 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Margot is the common factor of the three narratives. I am still trying to put the stories together. Face psychology; investment scams; and recovering from an accident comprise the narratives of the Face Thief.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Margot is a grifter that has been pushed down the stairs and lost her memory. As the story unfolds we learn that she has swindled John Potash of his life savings. He is determined to get it back at any cost. She also learns from speaker Lawrence Billings who gives body language and face reading seminars. She becomes a private student and somewhere along the way their relationship turns bizarre. At first, as I begin reading, I enjoyed what was going on but thought all in all it would be a different book. I didn’t feel for the characters except for John and the ending just whimpered out. It was an okay book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It had been four years since I last read a book by Eli Gottlieb. I was very impressed with his 2009 psychological thriller, “Now You See Him,” and gave that book an enthusiastic five-star review. When I recently saw a review for his latest novel, “The Face Thief,” in a major national newspaper, I quickly bought it and uploaded it to my Kindle. I finished it in less than twenty-four hours. I’d expected a compelling novel and it did not disappoint… at least, on that account. Overall, I was pleased with the reading experience, but I was not overly impressed. Was it the book or am I becoming more discerning as a reader and reviewer? I think it is a little bit of both.The plot of this book is fairly straightforward for a psychological thriller. It concerns three main characters: Margot, a glamorous, amoral, and possibly psychopathic con artist, and two men she is attempting to swindle, Lawrence and John. Lawrence is a psychologist who has made a commercial success out of training people in face-reading skills. John is a wealthy recently married businessman. Both men live on opposite ends of the U. S., but that doesn’t stop Margot from working both of these men, through entirely different kinds of confidence tricks, at the same time, in different locations. The chapters alternate between these three main characters. With growing fascination, we see what is happening from three separate viewpoints. The chronology moves forwards and backwards in time; Gottlieb uses this effectively to add tension and he deftly makes sure the reader is never confused by the transitions. The major twist that becomes clear early in the book is that one of the two men has managed to push Margot down a large flight of stairs landing her in the hospital and causing extensive temporary brain damage…in fact, she can’t remember much of anything about who she was or what she was doing before the fall. It takes almost the whole book to put the pieces together and by them we’ve had a pretty good time finding out.There is a seductive disconnected strangeness over the entire work, a noir fog; it’s very effective, and perhaps designed to echo Margot’s foggy thinking after her brain trauma. In any effect, it adds to the psychological edginess and darkness of this work. These are three unlikeable main characters. Readers will not be tempted to root for any one of them. Readers just want to find out what has already happened, and when the present catches up in the time sequence toward the end, we need to know how it will all work out. This is a very good book. I’m rating it four stars because, despite all the literary attention Gottlieb paid to fleshing out his three main characters, I never fully believed any of them. For me they were stereotypical bad guys. I know Gottlieb can do better. I’m not quite sure why these three characters never felt fully real to me. Perhaps their reality was sacrificed to create the moody noir fog that makes the whole work so darkly and very attractively atmospheric.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    jumping from one main character to the next while telling ONE story is difficult, but the author was able to do it. as a reader you try to put the puzzle pieces together and you will get it right, but the ending will still be unpredictable. very interesting story. and another proof that men are easy .....
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The perfect criminal is one who can read the body language and facial features of their victim and that is just the premise for the latest book from Eli Gottlieb, The Face Thief.The book revolves around the lives of three people involving a series of circumstances with a common thread. The more you know about a person, the better it enables you to gain the upper hand. If you can define someone simply by how they carry themselves and what their face tells you that their words don't can be very beneficial if you know how to read them.Margot is a promising up and coming journalist who wants to gain the advantage in the business world in learning to read faces and define the subtle movements our body language portrays. She hopes it may give her the advantage she will need to climb the corporate ladder in the competitive world of journalism where being a female may be the disadvantage. So when she signs up to take a course designed by the expert in reading body languages and faces, she gets more than she ever thought she would.Lawrence Billings has made a name for himself as a best selling author and successful business man now leading seminars discussing The Physique of Finance: The Art of Face Reading and Body Language for Professional Advantage. He always had unique gift of seeing things others missed and now it was paying off in a big way at fifty three and still married to Glynis even after his indiscretions. Life was perfect until Margot showed up in his class. Things were about to change and not in the way he would have expected.John Potash has finally struck gold. When Janell Styles of Greenleaf Financial calls and offers him the best investment opportunity of a lifetime, one he's been waiting for his whole life, he takes a chance after his initial investments have returned better than expected returns. Now just when his personal life has finally settled down after a recent divorce, he plans to invest in their future in a very big way. However life isn't always what we expect despite how we may think we have it all figured out.I received The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb compliments of William Morrow, a division of Harper Collins for my honest review. This book really does have quite a few twists and turns and until about half way through I didn't realize what was happening with the three different story lines in the book, however now looking back I could see how it all played out. As a reader, keeping that in mind, it will make the book much more enjoyable knowing that when you begin and throughout the book, you will find the pattern that shows how they all interconnect without realizing it. I would rate this book a 4 out of 5 stars for that reason. It deals with preying upon peoples trust and weakness to make a fast buck no matter what the cost and having the best tools on hand can make it that much easier.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The novel starts with a woman falling down the stairs. We don't know if she has been pushed but we quickly discover that there are two men who could have done it.Josh Potash invested his savings, only to discover it was a scam, so he tries to find the woman and try and get his money back.Lawrence Billings is a "face reader" who has written books and gives seminars. Margot asks for personal lessons and becomes a prize student.A cop questions Margot as her memory slowly returns. He knows what she is but thinks he can change her.The story moves between the three characters. None are really likeable but they are very human. You may not like the ending but I found it fitting with the rest of the story. I would recommend this to anyone who can enjoy a book off the beaten path.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Lawrence Billings finds himself with an promising student for his training on how to read faces and body language. But it might just be the professor who fails the final in that class.John Potash has carefully been building his financial future, and has had a great deal of luck so far. He does his due diligence with a company, eventually buying into it with with most of his life savings, only to find the investment office gone the next day.In a Manhattan hospital, a young woman is trying to recover from a brutal fall down a set of marble steps. Was it an accident or attempted murder? She remembers nothing...or maybe she does.What do these three have in common? That's what Gottlieb spends his whole novel weaving up for you. The clues are there, but they don't always add up. What exactly is going on? You'll have to read yourself to figure THAT out.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I usually run into trouble when I read a book in which I find that I dislike all of the characters. “The Face Thief” is one of those books…and yet at the end of the day, I did like this book.I suppose I liked the WAY in which author Eli Gottlieb makes each of the main characters unlikable. Their egos and wildly over-inflated senses of self worth make this a satire of sorts, mocking many aspects & professions of our modern society.“He began, as he was supposed to, with the local, or he supposed, Local. This he did by dwelling on the outlying suburban grid of houses, artfully screened one from the other through small trompe l’oeil wilderness settings, where lean, smart people were returning home from work in their low-pollution cars and sustainable light rail conveyances. Many of them wore clothes made of recycled plastic bottles and employed personal skin and hair-care products derived from low-carbon footprint processes. They drank shade-grown coffee and ate foods rich in monophytomers and glyconutrients. Progressive on all the important questions, they drove life toward a kinder, cleaner, more humanly scaled future. These were his people. He belonged among them. Somehow or another, he’d aligned the energies of his life to arrive at their golden summit in the pecking order of destiny. Had any citizens in history ever been more deliciously replete in their existence?”As heavenly as that kind of existence sounds to me…I get the idea and the humor in the self-satisfied, pat oneself on the back way.This book is peopled with characters who take action in direct opposition to who they consider themselves to be…yet directly in-line with their true natures. There is a husband, whose living depends on teaching others to read faces and to gain inner knowledge of other people who is clueless about his own character and about the women he comes into contact with…and is even more clueless about his marriage.“The forty-eight hours since his wife left had been a trial. During the first day in particular, out of force of long-standing habit, he’d tried to call her several times, but her phone, maddeningly, rang on through, and it was suddenly borne in on him just how powerless a person is to make someone else love them when that other person either (a) doesn’t, or (b) is withholding that love for reasons of being white-hot pissed.”There is a cop…who for some reason thinks that the woman criminal he meets…she is different, she can be saved, she can be redeemed.The husband who is so pleased with his life and his new marriage that he risks and loses everything he has in order to make his life even better. Who prides himself on being so very smart and so talented…that when he makes his nearly fatal error, ends up depending on his mother to save him.“Did the soul ever grow older? That nine year old boy was still looking out of his eyes. Life was deeper, more punishing, more deliciously fraught than that child could ever have imagined, and filled with redemptions in the least likely of places. The towering wave of tears was about to fall, but there was still time for him to bury his face in the fragrant glen of his wife’s neck, and mutter the words, “Thank you,” out loud. Even better, in the quiet space of the chapel, in the moment before the rest of his life began, there was still time to mean them.”I just noticed that as I described these dislikable characters…the one I didn’t describe was the true villain of the book. I didn’t like her either…but she at least seemed to accept her nature. She was honest in her dishonesty. The others…just seemed to be honest when it either suited them…or when their actions reached a breaking point and there were honestly unhappy about being found out.