Title: The Frame-Up
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication date: February 13, 2024
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

A magically gifted con artist must gather her estranged mother’s old crew for a once-in-a-lifetime heist, from the New York Times bestselling author of Stranger Suspicious Minds.

Dani Poissant is the daughter and former accomplice of the world’s most famous art thief, as well as being an expert forger in her own right. The secret to their success? A little thing called magic, kept rigorously secret from the non-magical world. Dani’s mother possesses the power of persuasion, able to bend people to her will, whereas Dani has the ability to make any forgery she undertakes feel like the genuine article.

At seventeen, concerned about the corrupting influence of her mother’s shadowy partner, Archer, Dani impulsively sold her mother out to the FBI—an act she has always regretted. Ten years later, Archer seeks her out, asking her to steal a particular painting for him, since her mother’s still in jail. In return, he will reconcile her with her mother and reunite her with her mother’s old gang—including her former best friend, Mia, and Elliott, the love of her life.

The problem is, it’s a nearly impossible job—even with the magical talents of the people she once considered family backing her up. The painting is in the never-before-viewed private collection of deceased billionaire William Hackworth—otherwise known as the Fortress of Art. It’s a job that needs a year to plan, and Dani has just over one week. Worse, she’s not exactly gotten a warm welcome from her former colleagues—especially not from Elliott, who has grown from a weedy teen to a smoking-hot adult. And then there is the biggest puzzle of why Archer wants her to steal a portrait of himself, which clearly dates from the 1890s, instead of the much more valuable works by Vermeer or Rothko. Who is her mother’s partner, really, and what does he want?

The more Dani learns, the more she understands she may be in way over her head—and that there is far more at stake in this job than she ever realized.

I’m not entirely sure what this book was trying to be. A heist caper? A tale of generations of women with magical powers forced to serve a supernatural being? A contemporary romance, complete with love triangle? Perhaps the problem is that The Frame-Up tries to be all of these, and doesn’t quite hit the mark with any.

Dani Poissant has been estranged from her mother and her chosen family of art thieves ever since she turned her mother in to the FBI ten years earlier. Now, she lives and works alone, using her magical gifts to scam bad guys and restore a little bit of justice to their victims (and earn a paycheck for herself).

When her mother’s former associate, a mysterious man named Archer, tracks her down, she’s forced to confront her past. A billionaire art collector, who has never let anyone inside his well-named Fortress of Art, has died, and his family plans to open the collection to the public for the first time and auction it off. There’s a painting that Archer wants, and he wants Dani to get it for him.

For… reasons, Dani accepts, and heads back to her old home base to reunite with her former circle of thieves/family and plan one final heist, hoping to repair her connection to her mother and rid themselves of Archer once and for all.

I’ll be blunt. This book is a mess. Plot lines are all over the place, as is the tone. We’re supposed to feel Dani’s deep connection to the people she goes back to — Rabbit, Mia, Elliot — but none of it is fleshed out. We’re told about Dani’s thoughts and emotions, but none of it felt substantial to me.

The magical powers that enable them to control technology or create master forgeries or find anything lost are a convenient jumble, and the heist itself is nonsensical, as are the other magical art thieves who try to get in their way.

The storyline about Archer’s past with the women of the Poissant family is a little more interesting than the rest… but it doesn’t get explained until past the midway point of the book, and even then, it feels familiar. A supernatural being haunting/controlling generations of women in the same family? I could name at least two or three other books with the same theme.

Messy, jumbled plots and characters aren’t helped by messy writing. There are sentences that I had to stop and parse — just who are we talking about here? There’s even a scene where someone using an alias gets referred to by his real name — but it’s clearly not an intentional slip or a piece of the plot, just a place where more editing was needed. I can only hope that the errors and awkwardness I noticed in the ARC are cleaned up in the final published version.

I considered DNFing repeatedly throughout this book, but wanted to see it through in case something happened in the latter half to make me feel more invested. It didn’t. By the end, I was hate-reading. I was going to finish this book, dammit!

Such a disappointment. I read the author’s three previous books, which were all cheery, silly, supernaturally-infused adventure/romances. I hoped for a similar reading experience with The Frame-Up, but sadly, that was not the case.