Loophole or How to Rob a Bank

Rating:
Summary: from inside flap:
Review: how do you crack a safe in an unrobbable bank? If you are Mike Daniels, ambitious professional thief and master safe-cracker, you plan for months in minute detail. You hire three hard bitten colleagues whose work you respect. And you find yourself Stephen Booker, out-of-work architect and civil engineer, whose comfortable suburban life is coming apart. You pick his brain, get him involved, wear down his moral resistance, and hire him. Then you enter the London sewer and bore from within. The safe has a time lock, and you have a weekend in which to dig a tunnel under the vault and blast it open. If you throw the alarm, half the police force will be on your tail. The timing must be split second. Nerves are stretched. One of your men is claustrophobic. There is constant danger of lethal gas. A rainstorm can wipe you out. But if you pull it off, the prize is several million pounds and pride in having done the biggest, more daring; and ingenous job in history. If you pull it off, that is...

Rating:
Summary: Short and Moderately Entertaining
Review: Loophole is a good book, but the reading level it's geared for couldn't be greater than that of a young teenager. It's not a children's book - in fact, the story is quite grown up. Don't be confused about this book. It doesn't reveal methods of robbing banks (except for one, which the criminals use to successfully rob a British bank); it's not a "How To" book of any kind. It's a story - a very easy read. And it's a true story, too (but outdated. If you're a potential bank robber, don't bother trying to use the method of robbing banks these guys used - it simply won't *work* today). I was disappointed in the lack of detail in the book. I would have loved to have seen further character development and a longer ending. It seems that, once the robbers succeeded in their heist, the book was over with and had little more to say.

You'll probably enjoy this book because the storyline is exciting and attractive. Incidentally, it doesn't live up to its potential. Robbing a bank of great magnitude is exciting and dangerous - give it a few moments of thought. Loophole fails to capture that excitement as well as it could have, and for that, I cannot give it a full 5-star rating.

Thanks for reading this review.