It should come as no surprise that we love a good story. We are especially drawn to a story when it involves stolen or lost art or literature and the hunt to find it or the race to save it. Some of our favorite nonfiction books of the past few years have been Jonathan Harr's  The Lost Painting, which detailed the search for a missing Caravaggio painting and Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men (made into a disappointing movie, but still a great book) that told the story of hundreds of priceless stolen art objects rescued by American soldiers from secret Nazi hiding places at the end of World War II. These books often read like the best espionage thrillers, with the added bonus that they are true! We are delighted to find two new books that fit this category.

The Vanishing Velazquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, by Laura Cumming, is of course of great interest to us because of the subtitle. How could we not be intrigued by a bookseller's obsession? This is an historical thriller that begins in 1845 at an auction. Bookseller John Snare finds a dirt-blackened painting that is attributed to a Flemish painter, a portrait of Charles I of England. But he senses that something is wrong. The subject in the painting is much too young to have been painted by the artist to which it is attributed. And so begins Snare's search for the real artist. His research leads him to Diego Velazquez, the Spanish master whose portrait of Charles I has been missing for generations. We've already said too much so we'll give no spoiler alerts, but trust us, this book is a wild ride through a world of mistaken identities, politics, crime and passion. It's a page-turner of the highest order.

And here's a book we would love for its title alone, but there's so much more to love it for! The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts, by Joshua Hammer, is a story from the 1980s about how a mild-mannered archivist became a smuggler of historic texts. Abdel Kader Haidara worked for a government library tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in obscure places. When Al Qaeda began their systematic destruction of priceless and irreplaceable works of art and literature, Mr. Haidara found his true calling. He organized a dangerous and secretive operation to sneak books and manuscripts out of Timbuktu to the safety of southern Mali. This action taken by a historian and his underground army of librarians saved 350,000 volumes from certain obliteration. As far as we can tell, that's pretty much the definition of Bad Ass.