The Coral Thief [Hardcover]

Pacy, beautifully written and absorbing, The Coral Thief is as clever as it is dramatic. Stott's reconstruction of Paris in the 1815 is quite brilliant - the work of a historian as much as a novelist- and dark shadows, underground passages, museums, the Seine and a mail coach journeying through the night are conjured before your eyes. It works on many levels - rich with ideas, charged with emotion, tense with drama as spies, philosophers and scientists are drawn into the vortex of post revolutionary Paris. The characters are as complicated as the time in which they live and the relationships between them more than meets the eye.
Stott has a rare ability to combine the near impossible - forensic history, natural science, philosophy, a love affair and a robbery in one fast-moving thriller. A very worthy successor to Stott's first novel Ghostwalk. You won't want to put it down!

I loved this tale of crime, physical and intellectual danger set against the background of the chaos of Paris after the final defeat of Napoleon, occupied by the conquering troops. Ms Stott weaves a fascinating fantasy: master-criminals on both sides of a corrupt society, the emergence of pre-Darwinian ideas about the transmutation of species, the restoration of previously looted treasures by force, by diplomacy, and by stealth. Was it true that the spirit of the enlightenment was freer in Revolutionary France than in Georgian England? As in all works of fiction one has to suppress a little incredulity and accept the occasional flaw. The excitement of the story just keeps one reading.

From his arrival in Paris straight from Edinburg by mail coach, Rebecca Stott unfolds the young the tempestuous adventures of the idealistic Daniel Connor and his affair with a beautiful coral thief. It is July 1815 and in Daniel's luggage are three rare fossils and the bones of a mammoth. Escaping the moral rigidities of his father, Daniel is mostly a man of science, destined to be an assistant to the illustrious Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes. As Daniel submits to the rigors of his profession, perhaps even heading towards an illustrious future with Cuvier, his future as he sees it changes when a tall figure sits next to him. She's darkly beautiful with black eyes and olive skin, her head obscured by a black cloak and she confesses to be a student of Lamark the famed transformist. This woman, who seems to know all about Daniel, is not to be trusted, especially when she steals his travel bag and a small case containing his specimens, and the manuscript entrusted to him. Even if he went to the police and made himself understood, even if the specimens were found and returned, the story would be the same; Daniel Connor had lost the rare and irreplaceable gifts, entrusted to his care because he had dropped his guard and fallen asleep on the male coach, seduced by a false sense of security by a beautiful woman.

By the time Daniel arrives in Paris, Napoleon is already a captive, the Allies quarreling about what to do with him and while Napoleon's fate seems strangely and superstitiously bound to Daniel's, the young scientist befriends William Fin Robertson from the Western Isles who takes Daniel personal tour of Paris and tries to get him to forget about the stolen items. When Daniel reports the woman's crime to the infamous Henri Jagot, poacher turned gamekeeper who runs the Bureau de la Surete, Jagot tells him the woman who steals from him is in fact Lucienne Bernard, a savant who actually works with a man they call Davide Silveira. But it us at the Louvre one afternoon, when he meets again thief in daylight, dressed in pale blue satin, when she stands next to him, that the spell is cast. While Daniel is almost angry behind words, Lucienne implores him: "You will have to trust me. I need something from you, something that you can only get for me." As the bells of Notre Dame struck out across the city.. I will bring your things back and then perhaps you will do something for me" There's an unaccountable instinct that makes Daniel trust her as he becomes tied to this woman by an invisible thread and the feeling that he is complicit in something he did not understand.

Meanwhile, Lucienne devotes herself feverishly to her true mission, the collection of her spiral shells, the intricate branchings of red corals, and the fanned shapes of sponges even as she beguiles Daniel with her past and her stories of Napoleon and his savants and soldiers in Egypt. But as Lucienne's recklessness increases so does Daniel's sense of foreboding. He's till trying to understand how a child of slaughtered aristocrats had become the philosopher-thief among the loops triangles and circles of her life and he can't quite reconcile the path that eventually leads him into the muddy and shadowy labyrinths of underground Paris with all of it's heretics and the thieves.

Stott layers the love story between Daniel and Lucienne with detailed historical background of new and exciting evolutionary theories along with a poignant interpretation of Napoleon's final days as he's banished to the island of St. Helena. This is a Europe that has begun the process of remaking itself, redrawing its borders, and forming new alliances. Paris itself is tangled with dealings of commerce and trade. It's a city of the revolution, but also a gleaming from Napoleon's public works, his new bridges and buildings. The most moving struggle in this novel is Daniel's as he becomes tangled in a web as thick as a forest, especially when he learns of Lucienne and Davide Silveira's plans to steal the precious Satar diamond from the Jardin des Plantes.

With Jagot's veiled accusations and threats over which he had no control, Daniel is forced to reassess the direction of his life. Placed in a corner by Jago, Daniel remembers the shadowy and tentative allegiance he had made to Lucienne in the Lourve and tries his best to extricate himself from the apparently dangerous place he seemed to have taken in Jagot's investigation. Yet like "the corals on the seabed," all the little things, all the crossings and collisions add up to something unexpected and of consequence. While Lucienne comes across as a little one-dimensional, her character lacking substance, Daniel's adventures are bought vividly to life in a novel filled with drama, passion, art and a fair amount of scientific discovery. Meticulously researched, the novel seems to transcends time as Daniel walks the streets of Paris and the labyrinths under the city, finding a new love while also becoming caught up in a heist he could never have imagined. Mike Leonard December 09.