Will Chen is a Chinese American art history student at Harvard who witnesses a museum heist and shortly thereafter is approached by a Chinese corporation with an offer: Fifty million dollars to steal back five bronze zodiac heads looted from the Old Summer Palace in 1860 and now sitting in Western museums. He assembles a crew of five Chinese American students — a hacker, a driver, a con artist, his own sister. The heists are the frame; the book is really about the five of them, diaspora, and what it means that the objects were stolen first. It’s a heist novel with a genuine argument about repatriation underneath it—but don’t worry, the heist satisfies.
Portrait of a Thief