125,910 Words

The Final Heist is the fourth and last novel in the Eddie Grant Series, the story of a wealthy Paris businessman who was a decorated officer of the U.S. Special Forces. Since his time as a company commander in the First Gulf War, he has taken on occasional volunteer work for his friend Icky, the CIA executive who was his classmate and his XO in Desert Storm. Treasure of Saint-Lazare, the first novel of the series, was chosen the best historical mystery of its year by Readers’ Favorite. With its successors Last Stop: Paris and Finding Pegasus, the saga of an unimaginably valuable painting stolen by the Nazis early in World War II plays out. The power in the story is not the sheer value, however. It’s the cost. Eddie Grant lost his entire family—his wife, young son, and father—to a gang of murderers who wanted the painting and the billion-dollar cache of gold bullion that accompanied it. They wanted the treasure enough to kill for it, and they did. Eddie put many of them away, one way or another, and thought he had ended the story when he drowned Claude Khan in the Seine, but in The Final Heist he learns to his dismay there yet another evil character lurking in the background. The story is set in 2019, five years after Russian dismembered Ukraine. A persistent oligarch wants to recreate the Russian empire in Central Europe and will stop at absolutely nothing. The plot opens in Paris and continues to Maryland and Texas, then to Spain, and wraps up back in Paris. The suspenseful climax happens aboard an old tramp freighter, a World War II Victory Ship that moves contraband around the Mediterranean. It’s not much of a spoiler to say Eddie puts the gold out of reach for the bad guys of Marbella and anyone following them. In real life as in fiction, the painting has never been found. To see the entire series, click this link: [https://bit.ly/42fG1k4]. My website is https://JohnPearceBooks.com