Jo Piazza Would Make A Great Art Thief

If you’re going to steal priceless art, pro tip: You can’t just bring any old screwdriver. Paintings are attached to museum walls with special screws to trip up thieves. That’s just one of the hundreds of tidbits author Jo Piazza gathered while writing her latest thriller, The Parisian Heist (out now).

The novel follows Emma, a struggling American artist in the ’90s who gets tangled up in a wealthy French family’s crimes, alongside a fictionalized Jo van Gogh, a penniless widow in the late 1800s determined to prove her late brother-in-law Vincent’s work has value. Their stories converge during a high-stakes caper at the Musée d’Orsay.

“I love an untold story of a woman that history’s forgotten,” says Piazza, 45. (Her 2025 novel, The Sicilian Inheritance, was inspired by the rumors surrounding her own great-great-grandmother’s murder.)

By coincidence, a real heist made headlines last October just three days before the Philadelphia-based author announced her 13th novel: $102 million worth of jewelry was stolen from the Louvre.

“The book was locked and loaded — it was done. We were about to reveal the cover with you guys,” she says.

Then, earlier this month, $4.5 million worth of jewelry was stolen from the Lalique Museum, also in France. (Art theft — so hot right now.)

To make her break-in believable, Piazza interviewed experts, including the head of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where investigators are still trying to solve the world’s largest art robbery (worth $500 million in 1990). “He explained that most aren’t someone backflipping over laser beams or any of the crazy stuff you see in Ocean’s Eleven,” she says. “They’re actually quite simple.”

The stories behind them, however, are anything but. Below, Piazza talks about her research process, sexy sculptures, and why women make the best art thieves.

What was your first reaction to the Louvre news?

It was actually so basic, right? It was just some dudes in construction outfits on a cherry picker breaking a window.

Are women better at heists?

One hundred percent. I’ve talked to all my experts about this. We don’t hear about women heisters as often because they don’t get caught as often as men do. We’re just more rational, more patient, more cautious, and better at multitasking. And I mean, look, I love men. But they are complete sh*t at multitasking.

You famously do an unbelievable amount of research for each book, like interviewing 100 female politicians and campaign staffers for Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win. What did that look like this time around?

I started out reading this massive doorstopper of a biography of Jo van Gogh. Then I read through all of her diaries. They’re on microfilm at the van Gogh library in Amsterdam, and it was very cool to see her actual handwriting. It felt like seeing a person’s soul.

I spent so many days inside the Musée d’Orsay plotting how my characters would move through those galleries. Also, there’s a really spicy scene in the Louvre, so I was wandering around there, weaving in and out of school groups, being like, “Is this the sexy sculpture they start snogging in front of?”

I went to Auberge Ravoux, the restaurant and inn in Paris where Vincent spent the last three months of his life. I visited the room where he passed away. You can still see all the holes in the walls where the paintings were. I feel like the book came so much more alive after I toured and breathed in those spaces.

Emma’s ability to make a living as an artist is shaped more by her privilege than by her talent. How much did your own career influence that portrayal of the relationship between creativity and money?

So much of the book is about power and access, and the general insecurity of choosing this line of work. So I do think a lot of that bled over into Emma. And then the character Stella, even though she’s incredibly rich, she still feels this kind of instability that I think a lot of women, and especially creatives, feel today.

What would Jo van Gogh think of The Parisian Heist?

I hope she would be happy to have her story out there, though she was very humble. I don’t know how she would feel about being in the spotlight.

But I do think she would feel a sense of achievement, knowing how well her work paid off. I mean, she was in her 20s when her husband died, she had this 1-year-old baby, and she’s thrust into the art world without knowing anything about it. I think that’s such a monumental example of how women pivot — and how good we are at finding ways to survive, no matter what’s thrown at us.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.