If Dennis Lehane and Dan Brown collaborated on a novel, it might be The Midnight Ride. Ben Mezrich's secret-history thriller is fueled by a chase through the streets of Boston, an adrenaline-pumping adventure that makes Paul Revere's historic ride look like a Sunday stroll.
The Midnight Ride introduces Hailey Gordon, MIT grad student of applied mathematics by day and card counter by night. As the novel opens, security at the hotel and casino Encore Boston Harbor is on to her, so she flees to a random hotel room. There she encounters a dead body, and then in walks Nick Patterson, freshly sprung from prison. Nick is on a job that he "inherited" from a recently deceased fellow inmate, but he's determined to keep his nose clean. As he sees it, there is "nothing illegal about meeting a guy in a hotel room, showing him something in a little plastic bag, in exchange for a nice fat down payment." That "something" concerns the Gardner Museum art heist of 1990, which Mezrich uses to launch a Da Vinci Code-esque adventure in which Hailey and Nick become fugitives--with the Bunker Hill Monument, the Boston Tea Party Museum and the USS Constitution among their hidey-holes.
Mezrich (The 37th Parallel) subscribes to the Schoolhouse Rock! school of no-pain history lessons: any gaps that readers have in their knowledge of the Revolutionary War will be filled by a couple of amusingly rivalrous Paul Revere scholars. He also subscribes to the Lehane school of crime-writing, in that readers should expect to sympathize with The Midnight Ride's morally shifty cast. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer