The Thieves of Heaven: A Devilishly Dull Time

While rules are meant to be broken, especially when it comes to art, the one golden rule that must absolutely never be broken in fiction, the one that every college creative-writing class will jam down your throat on a daily basis, is that you always SHOW, never TELL.

I guess those rules don’t apply to real-estate agents.

Author Richard Doetsch seems to be more concerned with his real-estate business in Greenwich, Connecticut than actually creating honest-to-God fiction. His book about a career criminal who plans ONE LAST JOB in order to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment is hired to steal a set of keys from the Vatican itself. Basically, the plot is Breaking Bad meets The Da Vinci Code (but more heavy on the crappiness from the latter and nothing of the greatness from the former). After finally stealing the keys, the main character Michael St. Pierre (yeah, he’s a saint AND he’s a Michael/Peter) gradually realizes that his boss is a little more sinister than originally suspected (Spoiler: he’s the Devil) and the keys are actually the keys to the gates of Heaven.

The Thieves of Heaven certainly has its strong points: the plot really isn’t quite as cut-and-dry straight forward as one would think from reading the synopses. The book opens with Michael committing one of his typical burglaries, which goes wrong when he notices a crime being committed, a murder/rape, and tries to save the life of a woman. He’s arrested and Doetsch cuts to years later when Michael is out on parole. Instead of diving right into the plot, Doetsch takes his time and forces us to become invested in the characters, such as Michael’s relationship with his wife Mary (yeah, I know) and his friendship with his parole officer Paul Busch. We then have to suffer through Michael’s uncertainty about his wife’s cancer, along with his pain with being unable to afford her treatment. When it comes to the character of Finster, the business-tycoon who hires Michael to steal the keys, Doetsch does a great job of gradually convincing us that the Devil actually exists and is a character in the book. Michael is forced through the same doubts as us, both the reader and protagonist are in need of convincing from Simon, a catholic mercenary who’s purpose in life is to defend the keys from theft, and when Finster finally morphs into full-out demonic form…it’s actually not THAT cheesy. There are also a lot more surprises than one would assume, such as Michael having to flake on his parole in order to leave the country, which puts him at odds with his best cop friend Paul, and an interesting back-story to Simon. Overall, The Thieves of Heaven had great potential to being an excellent crime/biblical thriller.

HOWEVER, besides plotting and some easy yet still interesting character-development, Doetsch actually can’t write worth shit. His exposition isn’t nearly as awful as Mario Puzo’s (who’s really one of the worst successful authors of all time) but enough of it is there to ruin what could’ve been a great book. He pauses during the action of the story to give us at least two paragraphs of pure exposition every page and a half, making me believe that the characters were really just sitting there and thinking for twenty minutes during an argument or fight scene. Instead of describing what characters look like or their emotions, Doetsch simply tells us their emotions. And the description doesn’t get much deeper than “Michael was upset” or “Mary was sad.” Worst of all, Doetsch repeats the character-motivation over and over again throughout the entire book, an example being “Michael knew he was doing his for Mary and that was all that mattered.” Literally, that line, or a close equivalent, appears at least ten times in the whole book. Being at 446 pages, and in fairly large print, this book shouldn’t have taken more than a month to complete but it took thrice that since I simply didn’t care halfway through. Really, if you write a book about a master-thief teaming up with a religious assassin to steal the keys of Heaven from the Devil himself and BORE me, you really failed sucka.

Again, the plot is pretty damn interesting and surprising enough to keep some investment (except for a really easy and lame ending where the Devil is simply defeated by touching him with the keys: I guess he’s a vampire or something), and the characters are fairly-well developed and original. But the prose is dreadful, not to mention some bare-bones scene description which suggests that Doetsch has never been actually been to Italy, Germany, or really anywhere. Still, The Thieves of Heaven is an interesting enough thriller if you’re okay with reading on a middle-school level for adults, and if you’re completely out of books on your shelf and nothing good’s on t.v., but overall it’s a failed attempt at something that could’ve been great.

Still better than The Da Vinci Code at least.