It's mostly about the characters who surrounded Worth, and the painting that was Worth's greatest heist.

I was expecting to see what made Worth smarter or better organized than the other criminals - in other words, what made him like Moriarty - but there are only a couple of pages about his heydey operations. The book tells us that he assigned leads or jobs to various lower thieves, then took a cut of the earnings and sometimes fenced the stolen goods; but it doesn't "show" us how it worked or how big the syndicate was.

In hindsight, that's to be expected. Not only was he a careful criminal who would never leave a paper trail for historians to follow, but it was all over 100 years ago and there's nobody alive to be interviewed. So the author probably did as well as could be done.

The cover and subtitle are a little misleading as to the actual content, then, but it is interesting and well-researched.