"In her first novel, Ghostwalk, which was set in 17th-century Cambridge and involved Sir Isaac Newton, Rebecca Stott established herself as a subtle writer who wears her scholarship lightly. (A professor of English literature at the University of East Anglia, Stott also wrote the biography Darwin and the Barnacle.) Thanks to Stott's deftness and sly humor, Ghostwalk was as sprightly as it was enlightening. The same can be said of her latest novel, The Coral Thief, although here the plot accelerates at a faster rate (this is the 19th century), and the skullduggery is more colorful (this is Paris).... With consummate skill and compassion, Stott plunges Daniel the innocent into a serpentine plot that involves spies, philosophers, revolutionaries and scientists. Treasure may be at the heart of Stott's mystery, but fossils and corals are equally precious in this hybrid novel of action and ideas. Like Daniel, the reader emerges from The Coral Thief having had an adventure and an education."—Washington Post