Cloudthief

A smart, multilayered heist novel by a true student of the form.

A criminal career has to begin somewhere, and this one begins at a Manhattan storage facility. It shapes up, at best, as an entry-level heist, breaking into a barely protected storage unit to pilfer Upper West Siders’ forgotten belongings. But our burgeoning criminal encounters something more unexpected than a dusty treasure trove: a resident, Virginia, a young woman who has found a way to live off the grid in the heart of Manhattan.

Virginia, unsurprisingly, has an idiosyncratic sense of how the world works—and a deeply analytic mind and skillset that make it clear just how small potatoes the storage unit heist is. Soon the two of them are a criminal duo with their eyes set on the most lucrative target the twenty-first century has to offer: data. The bank heist or the museum robbery is a thing of the past, and with purely digital theft and fraud, it’s too hard to get away clean. The overlooked targets are the giant, anonymous data centers with hard drives full of all the information that make the world go round. Here, the data is physical, and no one is paying that much attention.

Or so they convince themselves.

Hitting every beat of the classic heist story but brilliantly updated for our times, Nathaniel Rich's Cloudthief escalates from a low-rent hustle through the slightly more glamorous data heist to one final grand, seemingly noble, high-stakes scheme that, of course, promises to change everything. And does, if not in the way anyone planned for.