No Man’s Land

Simon Gaul

ONE heist, one ocean, two men… historical fact and fiction is always a heady mix and Simon Gaul – a writer, businessman and ocean traveller – puts his own dazzling spin on this compulsive conspiracy theory thriller which blends a real-life, unsolved art robbery with a white-knuckle survival adventure.

It’s 35 years since the notorious theft of thirteen priceless works of art – including a Vermeer, Rembrandts, Flinck and a Manet – from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston during the early hours of the St Patrick’s Day revelries in March of 1990.

Security guards had admitted two men posing as policemen and claiming that they were responding to a disturbance call. The thieves then bound the guards and looted the museum over the next hour. The case remains unsolved, no arrests have been made, and no works of art have ever been recovered.

Harnessing this slice of intriguing crime history, Gaul (pictured below) brings readers No Man’s Land, an action-packed thriller – with a cast of brilliantly drawn characters – and a haunting portrait of a disappearing American frontier as he weaves together themes of survival, redemption and the brutal price of silence.

Stunned by the heist at the Boston museum, which has seen the theft of works of art valued at hundreds of millions of dollars by the FBI and art dealers, museum officials offer a $10million reward for information leading to the art’s recovery, the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution. But with no leads for the police to follow, it seems as though the priceless works have all but evaporated into a bleak New England night.

Meanwhile, on the South Fork of Long Island – one hundred and fifty miles away – Jake Dealer is amongst the last of a three-hundred-year tradition of America’s seafaring history. A fisherman born with an innate ability to read the Atlantic’s unforgiving waters, from which he ekes out a living, his horizons are defined only by his family and the ocean. But a plot has been set in motion in Boston – where money and power hold different meanings – and it is set to change the course of Jake’s life. And when, in the wake of a devastating tragedy, Jake is unwittingly ensnared in the greatest unsolved art theft in history, he’s left fighting to cling on to the only certainties he has ever known.

Gaul charts new territory in the American literary seascape, creating an unforgettable portrait of both a vanishing way of life and the depths of human resilience as he asks just how far will someone go to protect what matters most.

It’s the story of one of history’s most daring, and still unsolved, robberies brought to life through powerful and imaginative storytelling, an exploration of the dying days of America’s maritime traditions, and a brilliant intertwining of fact and fiction. Addictive reading from first to last!
(Whitefox Publishing, hardback, £20)