A Beautiful Crime by Christopher Bollen

Published by Harper on January 28, 2020

Nick Brink and Clay Guillory are lovers and scammers. Their first scam is simple and based on convenient circumstances. The next one is more daring. The novel’s suspense is built upon whether the two novice criminals can get away with fraud, or whether evil will be their undoing.

When Nick travels to Venice to meet Clay, he plans to leave his New York life behind him. Nick has been working for and sleeping with an antiques dealer, apprenticing in the art of valuing old silver. Clay was living in Venice with a decaying man named Freddy van der Haar until Freddy died of an overdose. Freddy was from old money but his money was running out when he died. Freddy’s American friends had a memorial in New York, where Nick met Clay. By coincidence, Clay has engaged Nick’s boss/lover to value the remaining pieces of family silver that Freddy didn’t sell.

Freddy owned one side of a grand old home in Venice, or at least he owned an interest in it, together with an elderly sister who is living in South America. The house, like Freddy, has suffered from poor maintenance. Freddy left his half to Clay, who is widely believed to be a hustler. The other side is owned by Richard West, who hated Freddy and has no greater love for Clay, who now owns half of the house that West would love to possess in its entirety.

Clay devises a scam to sell some of Freddy’s relatively worthless silver to West, using Nick to inflate the value. To that end, Nick must find a way to meet West while pretending not to know Clay. When the plan appears to be a success, Clay makes a more audacious plan to sell his side of the house to West by forging the signature of Freddy’s sister on the title transfer documents.

When both schemes appear to be coming unraveled, coincidence gives Nick an opportunity, albeit at the cost of his soul, assuming he has one. Another coincidence gives Clay some information that he wasn’t expected to have. Still another strikes a character mute when one of the protagonists would otherwise be in dire straits. The coincidences are hard to swallow but necessary for the outcome that Christopher Bollen wanted to achieve.

Apart from its reliance on improbable coincidences, the plot is credible and carefully constructed. On the whole, characterization is strong, although neither Clay nor Nick is particularly admirable. They are, in fact, remarkably unconcerned about anyone except themselves. Fortunately, West is even slimier than the protagonists, so defrauding him doesn’t greatly offend the reader’s sensibilities. Nick, at least, has some moral qualms about a choice he makes and another that he contemplates. Those qualms hardly make him an exemplar of ethical behavior, but they humanize him a bit.

A Beautiful Crime is rich with atmosphere. This is a crumbling Venice, a place where preservationists are at war with tourists and seekers of quick profit. I almost like the atmosphere more than the characters or coincidence-driven plot, and the underwhelming ending seems improbably happy. Still, Bollen’s prose goes down like a wine made from the perfect blend of grapes — complex and surprising, smooth and luxurious. The prose was enough to overcome my reservations about unlikely coincidences and self-centered characters.

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