The Great Orchid Heist is the first novel by Eleanor Vendrell.
Finished on: 10.6.2026

Plot:
Phil is really trying her best to keep herself and her father afloat. He is a recovering gambling addict, and recently Phil is starting to doubt the recovering part. Dreading that they might lose their home, she is looking for any chance to make money. In comes her best friend Chaz. Chaz has a looser relationship with the law, and he has a proposal: somebody wants to steal a special orchid from the local botanic garden, and if Phil can infiltrate it, they could make some good cash together. In her desperation, Phil agrees to the plan. But there is one person who stands between her and the orchid: grumpy, serious, beautiful Lily, the head gardener. As Phil tries to get into Lily’s good graces, she finds herself falling more and more for her, making her choices even more impossible.

The Great Orchid Heist is absolutely sweet and fun and I had a great time with it, but I didn’t love it. I think that is more a question of a personal mismatch than any question of the book’s quality, so you should definitely give it a try if it sounds like your kind of thing.

The Great Orchid Heist has all the ingredients it needs for a really fun book that can easily gain readers’ hearts. Both Phil and Lily are really nice characters and their chemistry works very well. Chaz is the engaging kind of flamboyant supporting character. The book is a lot about what big assholes entitled men are. There is a dog!

I think where I got a problem with the book was the fact that I am a therapist and pretty much from the get-go, I wanted to gently shake Phil. Vendrell takes a lot of care to explain the obviously illegal and also personally shitty choice by Phil to participate in the plan in the first place. The thing is, those explanations triggered all my therapeutic instincts. Phil, I wanted to say, your father is a fully grown man. You are not here to keep him from the consequences of his actions. You certainly should not ruin your life for your father’s sake. A house is just a house. Just move the fuck out. [In the end, thankfully, Phil learns this lesson.]

And with that inner monologue, it was of course difficult to really get into the story as a fun caper, a light-hearted romance with a heist and the complication that follow. It’s not that I didn’t manage at all, I certainly was also there emotionally, but I was a little more distanced than I would have needed to be to really fall in love with the book. But either way, I really had fun with this one and I can definitely see myself picking up more of Vendrell’s writing.

Summarizing: fun for sure.