THE MIDNIGHT RIDE

Mezrich, best known as a true-crime author, turns to fiction with this history-based thriller.

The novel begins with a prologue that recounts the notorious (and still unsolved) real-life theft of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, then jumps to the present. Math genius Hailey Gordon is paying her way through graduate school at MIT by gambling at the casinos, and she’s just been spotted counting cards. Fleeing casino security, she dodges through an open hotel room door—and finds a dead man. Right behind her is Nick Patterson, an ex-convict who’s there to meet the now-deceased Jimmy the Lip, who was supposed to be his connection to the deal of a lifetime—one connected to the Gardner heist. Hailey’s and Nick’s mutual desire to elude the cops quickly turns into a partnership to find the real object of the Gardner theft—which wasn’t any of the priceless paintings but an object, as the title suggests, connected to Paul Revere. They’re joined (grudgingly) in the hunt by Adrian Jensen, an enormously snobby history professor who’s been propelled into a related quest by the murder of a despised colleague. In the mode of the history-based, conspiracy-fed thriller à la Dan Brown, their race around Boston’s historic landmarks takes place in just a day. But it feels like much longer. Thrillers like this one are grounded in research, but in this book the research is dropped in giant blocks that leave the action in park for pages at a time. At one critical point, when a character is about to fire a gun, the action is interrupted by almost 300 words on how to load a flintlock pistol—a disquisition that does nothing for the plot but bring it to a screeching halt. When the action does struggle to the surface, it’s increasingly confusing and often improbable.

A conspiracy-driven thriller stalls out on too little action and a dissertation’s worth of research.