Kat Bishop has been hoping to leave her dark past behind. The first step was enrolling in the Colgan School, an elite private school. Things go terribly wrong when she is accused of stealing the dean's car, and she is expelled from school. The only problem is that she didn't do the crime. It quickly becmes clear that her friend, Hale, has framed her to bring her back into the underworld of art thieves ... a world in which her family has had experience in for generations.

She is about to find herself in the center of a major heist when she is contacted by Arturo Taccone, a major Italian mobster with a taste for fine art. He is accusing Kat's father of stealing five priceless paintings created by a number of the Masters. Taccone wants her to get them back for her or he is going to take it out on her dad ... and some of the other important people in her life.

While Kat has serious doubts about her father's involvement, she knows that she has no choice but to do Taccone's dirty work. She reaches out to her friend Hale, her cousing Gabrielle, and a few other teens who are connected to the business with the hopes of finishing the assignment in the allotted time. They find themselves racing back and forth Europe in the hopes of locating the paintings and designing a plan to do the impossible: steal them from their hiding place in a museum with some of the tightest security in the world.

This quick-paced tale explores the issue of Nazi-confiscated artwork and its affects on the artwork and how to deal with the fact that it may be owned today by someone with no ties to the original crime. We actually had a recent case here in Rhode Island that dealt with one such piece of art.

Things get complicated when Kat is drawn into a romantic love triangle with Hale and the son of an FBI agent with her eyes on bringing Kat's dad into prison fr his art thievery. It also doesn't help that her relationship with her cousin Gabrielle is less than cordial. Will they be able to pull things together in time to save Kat's dad?

This book is ready-made for a movie adaptation. That is probably not surprising when you consider that Disney is the publisher. That doesn't stop the book from being loads of fun. If you wanted to know what Ocean's Eleven would have been like if it had been cast with teens, this is the perfect example. Carter has created a new set of characters that will keep fans of her Gallagher Girls espionage school series interested while also bringing in new fans.

The book definitely ends leaving the possibility of sequels open. I know that I would be happy to join Kat and the gang for more adventures.