Fox and O'Hare Get Artsy: "The Chase" by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

The Chase - Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

The team of Nick Fox and Kate O’Hare are back at it: O’Hare, the FBI agent and Fox, the world-class thief and con man, find themselves reunited in their unlikely (and probably highly criminal) partnership. For The Chase, the agent (O’Hare) and her quarry slash partner-in-crime (Fox) set up operations in the world of high-end art thieves, complete with international intrigue and political shenanigans.

Once they've located (via bribery) and successfully recovered (via grifting and theft) a multi-million dollar ancient Chinese artifact stolen from the Smithsonian decades ago, the two figure they’re done. Little do they know that they've made a serious enemy of an evil billionaire, the kind who can field his own private army and back it up with a Predator drone complete with Hellfire missiles. Given their new-found “friend’s” deadly demands, the couple find that they have to come up with yet another plan – an audacious caper will require that they up the ante a notch or six. First, they need to reassemble the team they’d put together for The Heist, meaning the Driver (Willie), the Actor (Boyd), and the Mercenary (Jack); to whom they'll add the Hacker (Joe).  Of course, the master thief and consummate grafter (Nick) takes care of the detail work while the muscle (Kate)… muscles.

When I said, “up the ante,” what I meant was that they need to raise the bar. For the next caper, they need to pluck something like half a billion dollars’ worth of Rembrandts from a well-secured museum, and use them as bait to trap the bad guy before he kills everyone in Kate’s family.

You can expect a plethora of hijinks as the two plan and execute thefts and con games on three continents, not to mention mid-air. Oh, and also expect plenty of scenes of the pair’s mental obsessing over their opposite numbers whenever there’s a lull in the action.

Evanovich, Fox and O'Hare

The Chase is number two in the Fox and O’Hare (get it? Fox and hare?) series out of Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. Like the first book (The Heist), it’s unrelentingly lightweight, which is pretty much what one expects from the creator of Trenton’s finest skip-chaser, Stephanie Plum.

As in the Plum series, the action tends to the fun instead of the bloody, although serious crime fiction fans are likely to find the planning stages and the execution of their crimes seriously short on details. That’s probably because the series is intended much more for the romantic crime novel fans who lap up every one of Evanovich’s “by the numbers” series than it is for noir crime fans. That also explains why the sexual tension between Nick and Kate is laid on as thick as white makeup in a clown school.

If you’re a crime fiction fan in the mood for a serious plot, you should probably look elsewhere – The Chase is essentially a series of short action scenes with the spaces between filled by moments of unrequited lust. If you want to see some quality con games and top-notch criminal escapades in the service of justice – in other words, to punish the real crooks, you’ll find your appetites served satisfied if you spend a few hours watching reruns of “Leverage.”

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