In the crowded annals of art theft, no case has matched - for sheer, criminal panache - the heist at Russborough House in Ireland in May 1986. The Garda knew right away that the mastermind was a seedy, rotund, and brazen Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill. Yet the great plunder - including a Gainsborough, a Goya, two Rubens, and Vermeer's 'Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid' - remained maddeningly at large year after year. Cahill taunted the police with a string of other crimes, but in the end it was the paintings that brought him low. The challenge of disposing of such famous works forced him to reach outside his familiar world into the international arena, and when he did his pursuers were waiting. The movie-perfect sting that broke Cahill uncovered an astonishing maze of banking and drug-dealing connections that re-defined the way police view art theft. As if that were not enough, the recovery of the Vermeer - by itself then worth $200 million - led to a remarkable discovery about the way Vermeer achieved his photographic perspective, forever enriching the way we see his art. With the storytelling skill of a novelist and the nose of a detective, Matthew Hart follows the twist