A Royal Heist
A Royal Heist by Laura Pauling
Series: Heist, book #2
ebook, 167 pages
Published March 10th 2015 by Smashwords Edition
Alternate timelines collide.
Only one will steal the jewels.
Only one will have a happy ending.
Annabelle longs for freedom, trapped in a life where she feels like nothing more than a vapor, a ghost flitting through time. Under the strict and often cruel direction of her grandmother, she travels back to famous heists and steals art.
In a moment of utter despair and rage she commits an unforgiveable act. As a result, she’s sent back to the 1600s on a royal heist—to steal the Crown Jewels—in nothing more than a state-issued nightgown. A death sentence.
In a second reality, in that moment, she receives a weathered scroll with instructions not to kill her grandmother and to pass a message onto Fiasco. But who is Fiasco? And how can he help? On her next big royal heist, she faces the stark reality that she is in a race to steal the Crown Jewels with another version of herself from a different reality.
It’s a race for survival.
My thoughts about A Royal Heist ~~
I am not sure what it is about time travel that fascinates me but I love stories whose characters travel back and forth through time and potentially change their lives and the lives of those around them. Would that be something that you'd want to be able to do? I'm not sure if I would but those possibilities sure make a good story.
A Royal Heist takes us back to the world that we discovered in book #1, Heist. This story centers on Jetta, or Annabelle, one of the somewhat minor characters in Heist. A Royal Heist is her story but we do run across characters from book #1, so it all feels familiar.
Annabelle is just trying to survive, with a grandmother who makes her time travel and steal valuable art for her. When she is not time traveling and stealing, grandma keeps her locked up in an institution.
'What I thought would be my escape, ended up sentencing me to something worse. How worse? I don't want to know.'
Laura does a wonderful job weaving several threads of this story together with characters running into each other in different time periods. Will their actions help or hinder their other selves? She also paints very descriptive pictures with her words and I could see and feel exactly what her characters were seeing and feeling.
'My words are like a taser to his chest, a bolt to his brain. Horror leaks from his eyes, and he whips around and sprints away, as if I'm the devil himself. I stand unmoving, frozen to the spot. He knew something. He knew me. I could tell, the flash of recognition on his face. And now he's gone.'
It sounds like Laura maybe has another story in the works to continue this series, focusing on another character. I sure hope so. I love this series and I love discovering how all of it fits together.
'A strange sense of deja-vu falls over me, like I'm living the wrong life; somewhere out there, in some other reality, is the real me. I'm a mirror image, a fraud.'
You can read my thoughts about
Heist (book #1)
here.
About the author
Laura Pauling writes about spies, murder and mystery for the young at heart. She lives the cover of suburban mom/author perfectly, from the minivan to the home-baked snickerdoodles, while hiding her secret missions and covert operations. But shh. Don't tell anyone.
And her kids wonder what she does all day while they're at school; or why on Monday mornings she's a bit grumpy. Living the life of a secret agent isn't easy, but someone has to do it.
This may or may not be what she really looks like. And she may or may not actually bake cookies.
You decide.
A Spy Like Me, her YA debut novel, and the sequel, Heart of an Assassin are now available. The Almost Assassin, the prequel to A Spy Like Me is a short story also found in the In His Eyes Anthology but now available separately.
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