A propulsive work of narrative nonfiction about how the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, how the robbery made the portrait the most famous artwork in the world - and how the painting by Leonardo da Vinci should never have existed at all.On a hot August day in Paris, just over a century ago, a desperate guard burst into the office of the director of the Louvre and shouted, La Joconde, c'est partie ! The Mona Lisa, she's gone!No one knew who was behind the heist. Was it an international gang of thieves? Was it an art-hungry American millionaire? Was it the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who was about to remake the very art of painting?Travel back to an extraordinary period of revolutionary turn-of-the-century Paris. Walk its backstreets. Meet the infamous thieves - and detectives - of the era. And then slip back further in time and follow Leonardo da Vinci, painter of the Mona Lisa , through his dazzling, wondrously weird life. Discover the secret at the heart of the Mona Lisa - the most famous painting in the world should never have existed at all.Here is a middle-grade nonfiction, with black-and-white illustrations by Brett Helquist throughout, written at the pace of a thriller, shot through with stories of crime and celebrity, genius and beauty.