Imagine you are a manager of a bank....you get to work on a Monday morning and your employee responsible for opening the bank vault informs you that the vault door will not open.This is how this book starts... Even the folks who built the vault cannot open it.
They inform the bank manager that something is blocking the vault door from inside!!! For a brief moment a thought crosses the bank manager’s mind - ".. did the bank get robbed?". But there were no traces of any break-in.
But why won’t the valut door open?? - Because the valut door is welded from inside!!! When finally the cops get inside the vault by drilling through the wall - they find over a ton of equipment (40 oxygen cylinders, 3 oxyacetelene torches, 1 industrial strength air exhaust, 2 rubber dingies, several pincers, torchlights, food, water & wine bottles etc) used by the robbers. The tunnel they built has concrete and wooden reinforcements and leads to the sewers under the city...
I read this 170 page book in one sitting...hardly able to put it down. The plot is far fetched requiring 2 months of digging thru the sewers to get to the vault. The cast is even more colorful - none of the crew have worked together prior this job. The mastermind has assembled a set of rag bag characters for this job by virtually advertising all over town. The crew almost get caught even before they get started. But they vanish with somewhere between 60 to 100 million francs!!
But wait, the best part is - it is a TRUE story. The place is - you probably guessed the country - is Nice, France, the year 1976, the bank is Société Générale bank and the mastermind is Albert Spaggiari. It could only be pulled off by a mad frenchman!!! Even as they were robbing the bank, they get an additional bonus when the local casino drops in over a million francs into the vault from the street level drop box!!!
Rene Maurice authored this book based on facts known in 1977. It was translated by Ken Follet into English. I rated this 5 stars not for the literary content but for the real life plot which is worth a read.