The starting point for this novel was the life and writings of the short story writer Katherine Mansfield. The author acknowledges " a lasting debt to the late Jacqueline Bardolph" , it was while attending a short story conference, organized by Dr. Bardolph during Mansfield's centenary, that Ms. Kulyk Keefer got the inspiration for "Thieves" And having just put the book down the image of an overgrown rose bush springs to my mind ~ a tangle of hooped branches, thorns and among them the odd bloom, badly in need of pruning. I grant there are treasures to be found ~ one of them is that it has made me want to take down again the slim volumes of K. M, herself and at the end it once again aroused in me heart-stopping sorrow at the vibrant life so cruelly cut short by a disease that some comparatively few years later could be cured when streptomycin was discovered. However, I remain abivalent. That sense of loss and pity I could have found from either reading Claire Tomalin's or the earlier Antony Alpers biographies both of which are excellent and much more rigourous in tone. I feel here as if I am at one extra remove: perceiving Katherine Mansfield filtered through Ms. K. K sensibility, which she masks multifariously by the creation of several fictional characters, the thieves of the title, who are more or less serious scholars, or just individuals obssessed by K. M and her life. Within the lush narrative of Mansfield's life, we get their lives too in seemingly ever wideing perspectives which overload the narrative. ( How could anything a novelist invent stand up to the narrative of that vibrant and doomed life?) In this way the lily is gilded so to speak to the extent that the flower gets lost in the baroque ornamentations of the vase. Thieves - or grave robbers? I think it takes a very fine writer and a great sensibility to take a person's life and turn it into a work of literature. Ms. K. K is competent but the machinery creaks and the fiction doesn't live up, to my mind, to the measure of the inspiration.