A family business can be a blessing or a curse.  You can love it, or hate it, but either way you are stuck with it. Family business can be any kind of business. One that rather get Christmas presents on Boxing Day, or all donate their livers for cancer patients. Other runs the local pharmacy, food supplies, or dinner. Others all become doctors or go to war. Yet special type of family’s goes to the darker side. Like running the black market, or being assassins. For Katarina Bishop’s her family is in the stealing family business. The ones that rob museums for the black market. Yet Katarina (who goes by Kat) got out of it, only no one can truly leave their family business behind.

Kat pulled the ultimate heist all by herself. She manages to get herself into the best boarding school in the country, leaving her family and her job behind. Sadly that did not last long as her former co-conspirator, Hale, manages to get Kat kicked out, and back into the deep of her family’s affairs. After all it was her father who got into quite a situation. Arturo Taccone is a very powerful; curl man with quite extortion paintings. Yet someone stole them from him, making him very angry. The person? Well their number one and only suspect is Kat’s dad, Bobby, who was that night doing a small heist in Paris, France. Unable to convince Arturo that her dad did not do it, he gave her an ultimate: give him all the paints within 14 days or watch him track down and kill her dad.  Unable to lose her only parent, Kat sets out with her teenage crew to pull off the biggest heist the family has ever seen. When luck is not in question, do they have enough talent to be able to come out alive?

Ally Carter wowed us in her first series following Cammie and the other Gallagher Girls, and she showed no difference in this series. The first of many Ally wraps us into Kat’s world of family drama, trust, and of course the planning and prepping of a museum heist.  Kat is a lovable character with some lack-of-mom issues that all girls face. Her father loved, yet distant, so was her uncle. Her dislike for her cousin was understandable and funny at times. Kat’s and Hale’s relationship is interesting and I am eager to see what direction it takes. Overall a perfect book with a new twist on the dark side of the family business.