Daring heists Real tales of sensational robberies and robbers

Adventure is at the forefront of the Mystery & Mayhem series, which visits and occasionally sensationalizes exciting true tales. Each volume contains five long-form stories that briefly touch on the event or person featured while also acknowledging other historical happenings of the period. Daring Heists contains stories of robberies on several scales, including the Great Train Robbery of 1963 and the amateur heist of the Mexico City Museum on Christmas Eve of 1985. Some names, such as D. B. Cooper, the epithet for the man who hijacked a Boeing 727 in 1971, will likely be familiar to some readers; others, such as nineteenth-century New York's infamous crime-queen Marm Mandelbaum, may be new. Each chapter is followed by a What Else Was Happening? section that concisely contextualizes each event. The text is, for the most part, straightforward, only occasionally delving into dramatization, while the layout tends toward blandness aside from a black-and-white map and time line at the start of each chapter, there are few illustrations. The true stories themselves, though, are thrilling enough to keep older readers engaged, and will likely spur further exploration.--Reagan, Maggie Copyright 2017 Booklist