This never really came together right. Dani's the daughter of an art thief who uses her magic to make copies of paintings that are utterly convincing. She used to work with her mother's team of magical art thieves until an FBI agent persuaded her to betray her mother, Maria. Maria went to prison and Dani has been kicking around and feeling guilty ever since. Now Maria's former partner Archer approaches her and asks her to do one last heist, so she must get the team back together and steal a painting. It's a great set-up. I was all in.

The problem was the execution of pretty much everything. There's an incredibly boring love triangle involving Elliot, a member of the magical art thieving team, and Brad, the owner of the target painting. Apparently Gwenda Bond thinks that getting all huffy and jealous is an attractive feature in potential love interests, because Brad sure does a lot of it, even though he's also a 'nice guy', which, geez. 

Maria herself operates according to utterly unfathomable motivations. She is very pro-heist, fully devoted to making this happen, so I simply do not understand why she does the things she does to interfere with it. At one point she gets Dani fired from her cover-job as head of security at the heist location, and it's presented as a training exercise: you were doing too well, dear; we must make the job harder. Um, wut? Why? Maria is fully invested in making this heist happen for Reasons, as we learn at the end of the book. So; why would she do anything to endanger it? 

There's another plot element involving a secret diary, which Maria hides where Dani can find it. Leaving aside how Maria got this diary in the first place, which seems to require some extremely helpful historical lost-child-finding from people that I don't believe would be inclined to reunite lost child with dead mother's diary, this diary is responsible for giving Dani qualms about the job. So why does Maria leave it where Dani can find it? It's presented as an intentional clue that Maria left for Dani, not an accidental discovery. But the diary is pretty damning with respect to Archer's history and motivations, so if Maria had any sense she'd want to keep it far, far away from Dani--especially since Dani has already proven herself  not fully reliable (y'know, with the whole betraying-mom-to-the-FBI thing). 

Then there's the actual heist itself. Heist novels need to have a crystal clear plan, so that when the plan falls apart and the underplan is revealed, the reader has a satisfying sense of wheels within wheels. The problem is that the secrets of the underplan and the workings of the primary plan were sort of scrambled up with each other, so I was never entirely clear what was supposed to be happening, and whether complications were expected or unexpected. And Brad ends up being SURPRISINGLY SUPPORTIVE of the whole heist job, in ways that really seemed like they were included for plot-convenience rather than any actual thought-out reasons.

So, in sum: good set-up, but the execution was pretty scrappy and ad-hoc.