From our Book Review Review desk:

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal featured a mostly-boffo review of Stealing Rembrandts, co-authored by Anthony Amore, head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Tom Mashberg, former Boston Herald reporter who’s been on the Great Gardner Art Heist like Brown on Williamson from the very start.

Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg have a textured feel for Rembrandt’s work. They have interviewed a lot of people. Most important, they have particular insight into at least one of the most well-known thefts: Mr. Amore is head of security, since 2005, at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, from which three Rembrandts and 10 other paintings were stolen in 1990. The criminals wore police uniforms and tied up the guards before vanishing with the art. Mr. Mashberg, a writer for the Boston Herald, has covered the still-unsolved heist for 14 years.

One unusual aspect of “Stealing Rembrandts” is that, in addition to talking to museum personnel, the authors interview art thieves. Among the more vividly rendered is Florian “Al” Monday. An orange-haired, tracksuit-wearing, bejeweled ex-convict toting an “unpublished typewritten memoir reeking of cigarette smoke,” Monday was the brain behind the “St. Bartholomew” job, in which one of his lackeys shot a museum guard with a .22 and Monday was sentenced to 9-to-20 years in prison. He is a discerning felon. “No one touches Van Gogh,” he sniffs to the authors, rating the painters he most admires. “Except maybe Renoir.”

Renoir? Renoir?? Florian “Al” Monday is an idiot.

So is Ben Mezrich, according to Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of his new book Sex on the Moon. Here’s her initial description of the author:

Ben Mezrich, the baloney artist whose highly speculative, Peeping Tom version of the Facebook story (“The Accidental Billionaires”) became, through no apparent fault of Mr. Mezrich’s, the basis for a brilliant, razor-edged movie (“The Social Network”).

It just gets worse from there. “Cookie cutter” Mezrich “is becoming most popular just as he runs out of new ideas.”

Nowadays Mr. Mezrich displays the confidence of someone on a roll. He no longer pretends to be telling true stories. He fakes and pads so excitably that his own tricks are better than his characters’. What is “an angry whirl of gargantuan white flakes”? Mezrich snow. What is “thick and dark and ominous, like the intertwining ropes of an immense fishing net cast across the sky, swallowing up every inch of visible air, obscuring everything, even the muted glow of the nearly full moon”? A Mezrich cloudy night. What is “Hollywood’s next big thing?” Mr. Mezrich himself, according to this own Web site.

Ouch.

Ex on the Moon is more like it.