When she first enrolled, M Freeman didn't know that her dead father's alma mater, Lawless, was the top-notch criminal training school for the children of top-notch criminals. As M learns about her dad's master criminal status and his fascination with a certain Rembrandt painting, she picks up where his last art heist left off. A smart and funny escapist read.

Gr 5-7 The Lawless School is an ultrasecret training academy for budding master criminals. Twelve-year-old M Freeman, named for her late father, a criminal legend, is whisked off to the school in a private jet, with a crack team of Lawless's highly disciplined archenemies in hot pursuit. After settling in and establishing her reputation as a bold but untamed thief, M leads a class project that will serve as an audition for the Masters, an elite society founded by her father. Her team will steal a lesser-known Rembrandt painting from a London gallery. The story resonates strongly with echoes of the Harry Potter books, particularly the Snape backstory, and is sprinkled with allusions to a range of thrillers, notably The Da Vinci Code and the film The Thomas Crown Affair . Well researched, it even offers a fair amount of art history (some of it spurious), deftly woven into an elaborate plot tying together 17th-century physicist Christian Huygens and Georgian-era celebrity thief Jonathan Wild-not to mention a car chase, a kidnapping, a doomsday plot, highly sophisticated technologies, whipsawing betrayals, and a cascade of discomfiting revelations about M's parents. Despite occasionally clunky dialogue and a few more-than-ordinarily preposterous details in the plot, Lawless is fast moving and fun. Bob Hassett, Luther Jackson Middle School, Falls Church, VA

After an odd interview, M Freeman finds she has been accepted into the Lawless School. She knows nothing about it, other than that her late father was a graduate. Within hours of acceptance, she is whisked away from home, told she will never see her mother again, and brought to a place that is nothing like what she expected. All the students at the school are legacies, and it seems the school prepares generation after generation of students to be master criminals. Thanks to some of the training she has been given by her previous homeschool teachers, M stands out from her classmates and seems to create chaos and destruction wherever she goes. The longer she stays at the school, the more she wonders if she can trust the people around her, and questions whether or not she belongs. Although there are a few gaping plot holes, middle-grade readers will be caught up in M's training and adventures and will read late into the night to find out what happens next.