The Mirror Thief Summary
Martin Seay

The Mirror Thief Overview

Martin Seay’s genre-defying novel, The Mirror Thief, weaves three unique stories together in an elaborate mystery that spans hundreds of years. Set in three different iterations of Venice in three different eras, the central story focuses on the alchemist Vettor Crivano in sixteenth-century Rome; the second on the gambler Stanley Glass in Venice Beach, California in the 1950s; and the third on the retired military policeman Curtis Stone at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas in 2002. The central character of each storyline is on a mission to uncover secrets based on limited clues. The revelation of the narrator’s identity at the conclusion of the novel forces the reader to choose between a poetic or pragmatic explanation of the events that unfold – a question that the novel itself is deeply concerned with answering. The main themes of the novel are the subjectivity of perception, the search for secret knowledge, disguise and deception, poetic and pragmatic pursuits, and the disruptive nature of memory.