The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau by Kristin Harmel
“… delights on all levels.”
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau is an exciting and thought-provoking read. In this latest historical novel by New York Times best-selling author Kristin Harmel, its protagonist is an expert jewel thief. The story alternates in time between her years growing up in Nazi-occupied Paris in the 1940s — where she steals watches and gems alongside her mother to fund the French Resistance — and the present day where the sudden appearance of a priceless bracelet once safekept by her mother offers hope of resolving her sister’s 1942 murder.
A Lifelong Thief with a Moral Code and a Secret Past
Living an exemplary life as a retired librarian in a Boston suburb, eighty-nine-year-old Colette Marceau makes a striking figure with her snow-white hair in a French bob and her signature red lipstick. She’s beloved for her many hours of volunteer work at the Boston Center for Holocaust Education. But in a riveting first scene at a glitzy music fete in downtown Boston one evening, Colette — wearing a dishwater-colored wig and nondescript black dress — manages to steal a ninety-thousand-dollar cushion-cut 8.07 carat yellow diamond ring, right off the hand of a keynote speaker whom Colette has fingered as a neo-Nazi. Rings are the most difficult jewelry to steal since touching is inevitable, explains Colette, but her polished tradecraft — pinching the woman to distract her, grabbing her right hand ostensibly to balance her while “sliding the ring smoothly from the woman’s left middle finger” — works effectively. Ring in hand she blends into the crowd and slips away.
Colette’s English mother trained her well in the family tradition of jewelry theft and her years in Nazi-occupied France — leading to the loss of her mother and sister Liliane and estrangement from her father — only strengthened Colette’s desire to honor her Robin Hood ancestry. After nearly eight decades, she has proudly funneled over $30 million in stolen jewels to anonymously fund her favorite worthy causes. Her moral code has been clear since childhood: no decent person deserves to have their possessions taken but those who bring harm to others are fair game.
A Bracelet Resurfaces … A Murder Demands Justice
When Colette’s picture is snapped at the fete, the Boston Police Department show up at her door for questioning. Attorney Aviva Haskell — to whom Colette has been a second mother since Aviva’s own mother’s death — recognizes Colette’s face despite the wig and has her own questions. Is Colette losing her edge?
But the kerfuffle fades when Colette gets news of an upcoming exhibit on twentieth century jewels that includes the priceless bracelet, which “she’d last seen in August 1942, just before her mother sewed it into the lining of little Liliane’s nightgown and less than forty-eight hours before the Gestapo showed up at her family’s door.” Four-year-old Liliane’s nightgown and dead body were found in the Seine days later, with the bracelet gone.
It was designed in Paris in May 1927 by a Jewish man for his wife and when the family was taken away Colette’s mother took it from the wife for safekeeping. Colette is now compelled to find its current owner. Might they have answers as to who took Liliane? Would they perhaps even know her killer? And will Colette have the nerve to steal the bracelet back? Does she have a right to steal it back?
Occupied Paris Comes Alive
While the characters are all fictional, key historical facts about Paris during the Nazi occupation make the story come alive. As Harmel aptly describes, “the Vélodrome d’Hiver, near the Eiffel tower … played a horrific role in holding the more than eight thousand Jewish citizens captive before they were deported … And in the Cherche-Midi prison” — where Colette’s mother was imprisoned — “real-life prisoners, many of whom were later murdered by the Germans, chanted ‘Notre Francee vivra’ or ‘Our France will live,’ every night at seven o’clock, their own quiet and continued resistance.” Colette’s terrifying experiences as a young teen in those days are painted well, filling out a vivid picture of a city and its people under siege.
Alongside her brave present-day moments of pushing hard to solve the mystery of Liliane’s disappearance, Colette is thrust back into her old life, meeting people from her past and revisiting a long-ago romantic attachment to a young man she may never meet again. Both in love and in mystery solving, Colette’s unapologetic yet generous demeanor opens her heart to a bigger life.
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau is an inspiring read, especially for its unique flavor of 1940s occupied France, but just as much for Harmel’s inventive twists and turns of plot with a surprise ending that delights on all levels.
About Kristin Harmel:
Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling, USA Today bestselling, and #1 international bestselling author of The Forest of Vanishing Stars, The Book of Lost Names, The Winemaker’s Wife, and a dozen other novels that have been translated into more than 30 languages and are sold all over the world. Many of her novels have been optioned for film and television. The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau is coming this June.
Kristin has been writing professionally since the age of 16, when she began her career as a sportswriter, covering Major League Baseball and NHL hockey for a local magazine in Tampa Bay, Florida. In addition to a long magazine writing career, primarily writing and reporting for PEOPLE magazine (as well as articles published in numerous other magazines, including American Baby, Men’s Health, Woman’s Day, and more), Kristin was also a frequent contributor to the national television morning show The Daily Buzz. Her first novel was published in February 2006.
Kristin was born just outside Boston, Massachusetts and spent her childhood there, as well as in Worthington, Ohio, and St. Petersburg, Florida. After graduating with a degree in journalism (with a minor in Spanish) from the University of Florida, she spent time living in Paris and Los Angeles and now lives in Orlando, with her husband and son. A breast cancer survivor, she is also the co-founder and co-host of the popular weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction.
Publish Date: 6/17/2025
Genre: Historical Fiction
Author: Kristin Harmel
Page Count: 384 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 9781982191733