"Bill Eidson plays no verbal tricks: He simply tells a good story, convincingly and in One Bad Thing, chillingly. Eidson writes a tough, direct prose edged with irony, and he may well be a successor, at last, to the much-missed John D. MacDonald." —Robin W. Winks, The Boston Globe

Bill Eidson's new thriller, ONE BAD THING (A Forge Hardcover; $24.95; September 11, 2000), poses the question: can an otherwise good man do something evil one time and go back to living his life unscathed? The answer to that question takes Eidson's hero Rob McKenna on a hellish journey through a fictional look at a real life mystery—Boston's Gardner Museum Art Theft.

The year 2000 marks the 10th anniversary of what is widely considered the greatest art theft in the world. Two men posing as Boston Police broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole over $300 million worth of art including three Rembrandts, five Degas, one Vermeer and one Manet.

Theworks have never been recovered. Many people believe they are moldering in a foreign warehouse, but Bill Eidson's premise in ONE BAD THING is that the collection never left the Boston area.

Rob McKenna is a good man who has lost much: his beloved daughter was killed the year before, and he and his wife are trying to reclaim their shattered lives. But their grief has pushed them apart rather than together. McKenna's wife leaves him in the Virgin Islands, forcing him to take on a crewmember, Tom Cain, to help sail the boat back to Boston. But Cain brings trouble on board and forces McKenna to make a desperate choice. "Do this one thing," Cain says. "Do this and you'll have a life." All McKenna has to do is lie.

And thus Eidson's cautionary tale takes off, a careening thriller that throws McKenna into a spiral of violence and deceit. Will this one bad thing destroy everything and everyone he once held close? The dark romance of the thriller has never been more potent than it is in Bill Eidson's ONE BAD THING.

ONE BAD THING is a work of fiction. However, for more information on the actual Gardner Museum Theft, look at the FBI website at: http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/arttheft/boston/boston.htm.