Royal Heist: A Novel [Mass Market Paperback]

Lynda La Plante (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 2005

From Lynda La Plante, one of the world’s greatest crime writers, Royal Heist is a big, dashing novel of deception, passion, and international suspense, in which a man with a dangerous double life masterminds the greatest robbery of all time.

With a beautiful family and a magnificent fortune, Edward de Jersey is making news with his prized racehorse Royal Flush. But while de Jersey socializes with the cream of English society, he keeps to himself the details of his background and how he acquired his wealth. The son of an East End bookie, de Jersey reinvented himself as an aristocrat after pulling off some of England’s most notorious heists. He has no intention of ever going back to crime . . . until his financial adviser loses his entire fortune in a disastrous investment and de Jersey decides to retrieve it the old-fashioned way: by stealing it.

From Monaco to the Hamptons, from London to the shadowy back alleys of cyberspace, de Jersey goes into action, using guile, force, and the latest technology to put together the perfect plan. Drawing on the expertise of a computer hacker with a passion for Elvis, the inside knowledge of a dying aristocrat, and the skill of a professional impersonator, de Jersey is ready to commit his greatest and final crime. He’s going to steal the crown jewels from under the nose of the royals themselves.

Now, as Royal Flush prepares for a spectacular run at the Derby, de Jersey faces his moment of truth: How much is he willing to risk to win the sport’s most coveted prize? And just how far will he go to get away with the perfect crime?

A novel that builds to an amazing crescendo of suspense, Royal Heist is a glamorous and gritty tale of men and women bound together by love, greed, trust, and mistrust. With all the pounding excitement of a high-stakes horse race, this is fiction that takes hold, doesn’t let go, and dares us to keep guessing until the very end.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

La Plante (Prime Suspect, etc.) heads for Ascot in this involving heist novel about a British champion racehorse owner who decides to steal the Crown Jewels after losing his fortune in an Internet scam. Son of a London bookie, husband of a Swedish beauty and owner of an enviable stable of horses, Edward de Jersey is also the retired mastermind of one of Britain's most famous unsolved robberies, a man who would rather die than give up his life of privilege. Step by step, he plans, prepares and executes a modern version of the Great Train Robbery, overcoming computerized security systems and penetrating royal protocol. De Jersey brutally dispenses enemies and boldly protects friends on both sides of the Atlantic, but it is his team of accomplices that makes this classic crime caper a compelling read, among them Pamela, the ex-con television actress; Lord Westbrook, the disgraced palace equerry; and Marsh, the computer whiz turned crook. La Plante's knowledge of the sport of kings, her sense of irony in human relationships and her deceptively cool narrative style allow her to visit familiar crime fiction territory with aplomb. She does not create the equal of her Masterpiece Theatre detective Jane Tennison, but she weaves an intricate story of crime and character that starts off slowly and then keeps the reader guessing as it gallops to a photo finish.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

La Plante's most famous work is the gritty PBS crime drama Prime Suspect; her latest is also imaginable as a television miniseries but of a very different kind--the high-concept variety featuring great wealth, thoroughbred racehorses, a cosmopolitan setting, and beautiful women with incredibly big jewels. Throw in a little greed, jealousy, adultery, theft, and murder, and you're ready for prime time. Royal Heist, however, is several cuts above its glossy brethren, thanks to a remarkable protagonist named Edward de Jersey (think Pierce Brosnan). A self-made British billionaire with a Swedish trophy wife, de Jersey is so darned likable that readers may feel slightly guilty rooting him on as he plots to steal the crown jewels--especially when a couple of people are murdered along the way. While the "heist" itself isn't all that believable, it's not enough to take our minds off de Jersey's cool head under pressure or his love for his racehorse Royal Flush. La Plante's opulent opus offers readers a chance to identify with a charismatic hero who romps with the super-rich. Jenny McLarin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (May 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812968034
• ISBN-13: 978-0812968033
• Product Dimensions: 4.3 x 1 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #920,217 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Glossy, Complex Caper, January 6, 2007

By 

Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Royal Heist: A Novel (La Plante, Lynda) (Hardcover)

Lynda La Plante, author of "Royal Heist," previously wrote the substantial police procedural "Prime Suspect." As a former actress, she then produced that book for television, under the same title. It thereupon became the influential, prestigious Edgar award-winning, British Broadcasting Company, and, later, Public Broadcasting System television series "Prime Suspect," starring Helen Mirren. That book, and tv show, were infused with the gritty realism of the English cop shop as it then was: La Plante researched it by interviewing the highest-ranking English police woman of the time. Book and tv series were also infused with the gritty realism of some of the meanest streets to be found in England at the time. In fact, in a recent interview, Mirren claimed that "Prime Suspect" was the first tv crime drama to accurately portray the workings of English police stations: all previous programs, she stated, even, for example, "Inspector Morse," were not. However, La Plante's "Royal Heist" turns its back on realistic grit: it's a crime caper set in the rarified world of horse racing, sport of kings, among some impossibly beautiful glamorous people.

Immensely rich Edward de Jersey, owner of prize horses, beautiful wife and daughters, meets the Queen of England at Ascot racetrack, and then is ruined by a [...] collapse. Therefore, de Jersey, a self-made man, born plain old Eddy Jersey, son to a bookie in London's East End, decides his only option is to steal the Queen's jewels, including the gigantic, invaluable Koh-I-Noor diamond. (He had, you see, originally made his fortune by a series of daring, big bucks, famous robberies, gold bullion, that sort of thing.) The author has here produced a reasonably complex caper, though, in the manner of this particular genre, she never actually tells you how this crime might be done; that probably just isn't the done thing.

Royal personages, world-famous authors, athletes, billionaires, performers, television personalities, and impossibly beautiful glamorous people tend to upend the delicate balance a good mystery needs, if you ask me. But somebody must like them: they do sell. Your cup of tea?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A crown jewel heist, August 17, 2004

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Royal Heist: A Novel (La Plante, Lynda) (Hardcover)

I generally like my caper novels with laughs and switchbacks. Instead, LaPlante, creator of TV's "Prime Suspect," delivers ruthlessness and daring. And a seemingly endless supply of obstacles. All of which Edward de Jersey is single-mindedly determined to overcome in his do-or-die quest to keep his life in the style to which he has become accustomed.

De Jersey, son of a bookie, has risen to the top of British society on the proceeds of previous criminal success. Now he breeds racehorses, looking for his crowning jewel, a derby winner. With Royal Flush that glory is almost within grasp when it all comes tumbling down. Suddenly, in a dot.com tumble, he's bankrupt. His trusted accountant has lost it all and killed himself.

Having previously carried out Britain's most daring robberies (a fact unknown to all but his accomplices), de Jersey dreams up a scheme to gather his old gang together and recoup his losses. By stealing the Crown Jewels. There are lots of problems with this plan, of course. Security seems impregnable. The old gang isn't getting any younger and none of them have stolen so much as a stick of gum in years. De Jersey's wife is angry and suspicious about his secrecy. His accountant's sister-in-law has gotten curious. And the team of robbers keeps getting bigger.

To pull this one off de Jersey needs a lot of accomplices, including a computer hacker, a queen, a lady-in-waiting, and a footman. De Jersey himself becomes a less sympathetic character as the plans grow more complicated, but the secondary characters are appealing. There's an odd distance to this novel, which is a mite off-putting, but the daring plot keeps the pages turning.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tough going at first, but improves in the second act, September 10, 2009

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Royal Heist: A Novel (La Plante, Lynda) (Hardcover)

Lynda LaPlante, Royal Heist (Random House, 2004)

It took me about a year and a half to read Royal Heist. Not continuously, of course. I started it back in December of 2007, struggled through the first few chapters, and when it had to go back to the library, didn't renew it. Here comes 2009, and I'm going through my backlist cleaning it out, so I put the book on hold again and pick up where I left off. (I get questions about that sort of thing. Honestly, I don't find it any harder to do that after eighteen months than I do putting a book down at night and picking it up again the next morning. I don't know why.) I'm glad I did, because it does markedly improve once you're farther into it, but I came very close to abandoning it for good after the first seventy-five pages or so. Be warned.

The novel concerns Edward de Jersey, formerly Eddie Jersey, a thief and con man during his younger years. With his friends James Driscoll and Tony Wilcox, he was part of a band of thieves known as the Three Musketeers, who after pulling off one of the biggest heists in British history, quit their lives of crime and went legitimate. Until, that is, all three invest in an internet startup run by someone even more fraudulent than they are. De Jersey, now a Thoroughbred owner with a horse who has a great deal of promise for next year's Derby, has no intentions of his ship going down, much less him going down with it. But the more he thinks about it, the more he has only one option: revive the Three Musketeers and pull off an even more audacious robbery, one that will return to them the hundreds of millions of pounds they lost.

Once we get into the planning of the heist, the book picks up. We don't get there for quite a while, however, and the setup is interminable. What's more odd is that the book's three-act structure would dictate a similarly detailed description of the police investigation after the heist (which occurs in act 2, naturally), but that part of the book is skimped on, glossed over in comparison to the setup and the robbery itself. Where we get detailed characterizations of the players on the shadowy end of things, the cops are no more than cardboard cutouts, and wet ones at that.

Readable, but not much else. ** ½