How to Steal a Million

In Paris, wealthy Charles Bonnet is well known in the art world as a collector of rare pieces, mostly of the impressionist masters. He will on occasion sell paintings from his collection at auction. In reality, he is an art forger, he only reproducing those pieces known to have gone missing. His daughter, Nicole Bonnet, wants him to stop this business fearing that some day soon he will get caught. She is most concerned about he loaning out his Cellini Venus statue to the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, as she knows that technology can now test for things such as material age which would prove that the statue and by association he is a fraud. He ends up causing a problem for himself when he signs a $1 million insurance policy for the statue for the museum, which unwittingly allows them to test the piece for its authenticity. To save her father from jail, Nicole feels the only thing she can do is try to steal the statue from the gallery which may not be the easiest thing to do especially as the museum has installed an electronic security system around the piece to protect it above and beyond the regular security. She contacts the only person she knows who she believes can help her, namely a burglar named Simon Dermott. Nicole and Simon had only recently met when he broke into the Bonnet mansion to steal a Van Gogh painting, Nicole catching him in the process. Nicole could not call the police to report him for fear that her father's fraudulent life would be uncovered. Nicole not only has to convince Simon to help her without actually divulging the reason why she wants to steal her own statue, but they also have to come up with a plan to steal it. Complicating matters is an American art collector named Davis Leland who is not only wooing Nicole, but wants to add many of M. Bonnet's pieces to his own collection, most specifically the Venus. Within this collective, not all is as it appears on the surface. —Huggo