Crime
By Newgate Callendar
Who doesn't enjoy reading a well-done caper novel? Hugh Zachary has supplied one in THE VENUS VENTURE (Vanguard, $13.95). It's about a gang stealing the Venus de Milo and holding it for ransom, and it's as neat and readable an adventure as anything in its line within the last few years.
Frances is sending the great Greek sculpture to be exhibited in Moscow. A highly competent French security officer heads the task force assembled to oversee its safe arrival in the Soviet Union. But he reckons without the plans of a small group of, mostly, Americans, who engineer the kidnapping in the most ingenious manner.
But stealing the Venus de Milo and holding it for ransom is not enough. How can the members of the gang live to enjoy the payment once they receive the millions? So they have to have some kind of insurance policy, and their leader has dreamed up an idea that seems foolproof. Of course, in this kind of book, things never turn out to be as easy as they might sound. Part of the attraction in reading the better caper novels is identifying with the minds of the thieves. We do not want thugs and killings. Things have to move with the finesse of a surgeon putting in the stitches after a lens transplant. Furthermore, the men and women who participate in so risky and imaginative a venture obviously have to be superior types. And they have to have a worthy opponent on the side of the law -- otherwise how could there be any thrust and counterthrust.
All specifications are met in "The Venus Venture." The criminals are sophisticated, smart, determined to stand together or fall as a unit. The French security man is intelligent, very capable, very much a man's man -- in many respects the counterpart of the gang leader. At the end there is a reshuffling of forces and an unexpected bit of authorial virtuosity that will bring contented smiles to the face of the reader. In "The Venus Venture" Mr. Zachary has contributed to the gaiety of nations. N.Y. Times Book Review (May 11, 1986)
THE VENUS VENTURE by Hugh Zachary (Vanguard; $13.95). A little gang of mostly Americans -- a tugboat captain, an airplane pilot, a brainy journalist, his lovely wife, etc. -- hijacks the Venus de Milo as it is en route from the Louvre by train to Moscow for a good-will appearance, and demands a ransom of thirty million dollars. But the gang reckons without Pierre Boudreau, chef de la garde du corps, whose feeling for the statue is one of almost insane intensity. Mr. Zachary's story is trifle, but it is a pleasurable trifle in which every character is interestingly likable and everybody's ending is happy. The New Yorker (June 23, 1986)
