The Art of Sex and Stealing

Written by Holly Glass

Narrated by Elaine Stone

As a kid, Gaby Evans saved herself from a repressive household by indulging in one little sin: the art of burglary. Years later, Gaby reawakens her favorite vice in order to make ends meet after her husband walks out. But when Gaby walks in on a crime during one of her break-ins, she’s pulled into whirlwind of danger and lust. As the mystery pulls Gaby ever deeper, she quickly discovers that she can’t resist her darker impulses or her deepest desires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781094409955

Holly Glass

Holly Glass uses romance to explore the complexities of gender identity, the joys of sexual fluidity, and the possibility of personal liberation in a highly gendered world. Her goal is to cultivate intimacy and health by telling stories that are authentic to life and love outside of the hetero-norm.

Reviews for The Art of Sex and Stealing

[Emilia Márquez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Short, steamy and well-written! I really enjoyed it. Too bad I couldn’t found it in Goodreads

[Jane Daugherty · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Although this book purports to explore “sexual fluidity,” a worthy endeavor, that’s a fraudulent description of this novel. By the historic definition of pornography accepted by the Supreme Court, “a work having no redeeming social value,” that’s actually what this book is, which is fine, and now, fortunately, protected speech. But why the high-sounding deception that the book explores sexual fluidity when it actually is just a story line used to string together graphic scenes of lesbian sex and the bi-sexual burglar’s equally graphic fucking with her abusive ex-husband? It also glorifies the “thrill” of burglary and offers “understanding” of the serial killer’s elation as he strangles women to death. The thrill-seeking includes the female burglar’s appetite for high-risk sex with the female homicide chief whose life she saved could have been an intriguing story arch. The cop makes clear she could put the burglar/single mother-of-two in prison. But the burglar’s appetite apparently knows no bounds as she encounters her abusive, child support-evading, soon-to-be ex-husband in the sleazy bar she’s staking out because that’s the common factor between all the strangling victims. She quickly abandons her mission to identify the serial killer when her ex shows up and she eagerly let’s him fuck her senseless, with no protection, in the sleazy bar’s bathroom. That’s not just fluidity of sexual preference, the graphical described bathroom sex scene between the burglar and her ex, later repeated in their former marital home with the kids farmed out with the babysitter, indicates the absence of any parental concern by the burglar about the harm her ex has done to her and their two young children. The plot had numerous junctures at which to explore how the non-violent crimes of the burglar, beginning as a survival tactic when, as a teen, she’s abruptly cast out by her cruel, homophobic parents when the find her stash of stolen trophies including a magazine photo of a nude woman and a condom. Her burglaries resume in earnest when she’s left penniless by her ex-husband. But the relentless mission of the author to bizarrely claim to champion sexual fluidity by describing the burglar as so sexually rapacious that in addition to her on-going sexual encounters with the PTA President/homicide chief whose life she saves, her effort to help find the serial killer at the sleazy bar where he picks his victims is quickly abandoned for unprotected bathroom sex with her abusive ex. (In that respect, the story seems in fact, anti-feminist.) There were so any chances for this book to explore the legacy of rejection and abuse by the parents of young lesbian, bi, gay, or otherwise sexually fluid teens. But that’s squandered by making the burglar into a character apparently so damaged that she has little concern for her two young daughters, except how she’ll feed and house them, that she almost leaves them motherless by fucking her chief abuser as readily as she fucks the homicide chief/mother/PTA President lesbian who it’s inferred she’s falling for. Holly Glass has written some worthwhile books. This isn’t one of them, sadly.