1–What is the title of your latest release? THE STRANGE CASE OF THE PHAROAH’S HEART   2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Sherlock Holmes takes on the curse of Tutankhamun.   3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? Luxor and London were pretty much de rigeur for a story about Sherlock Holmes and the pharaoh’s curse. Monte Carlo was just for fun, and the Reichenbach Falls seemed like a good place to kill off Holmes. Wait! Did I say that? Did I do that?   4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Well, I’d love to live in London, but I’m not crazy about coal fires or cholera.   5–What are three words that describe your protagonist? There are three protagonists, so I would have to say: mystical, skeptical, logical.   6–What’s something you learned while writing this book? There was an immense amount of skullduggery going on with the exploration of Tutankhamun’s tomb.   7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done? For me, it’s like a balloon. Once I have the balloon, I stretch it out, then blow it up. So I’m applying pressure at every…

The days when you could walk out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under your arm are over. There are all sorts of safeguards now—electric eyes, pressure sensors, lasers, which in the movies at least, must usually be overcome by dangling the thieves from the ceiling. I love art-heist stories. They always pose a question: what’s real and what’s fake? What’s the difference between an original and a copy? They also sketch out over the years not only a change in technology but a change in ethics. Here are five of my favorites. How to Steal a Million–1966 We start with the soufflé, extremely light, and, as you would expect of any film starring Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn. It just oozes charm. Surprisingly, under its candy coating, it also oozes authenticity. The forger(Hugh Griffiths, Hepburn’s papa) has made certain to dig up authentic dirt from Arles to add to his Van Gogh forgery. And it takes only a chip of paint from said forgery undergoing chemical analysis to prove it’s a fake. And it’s the forger’s hubris that places him in danger, which is often the case in real life, where it’s the risk of being discovered that…