Balloon Dog

What happens when the life you are living is no longer the life you imagined? When you are well and truly stuck? A darkly comic tale of longing and legacy, Balloon Dog, the fourth novel from best-selling ghostwriter Daniel Paisner, prompts readers to consider what it means to leave a mark and what it takes to be swept up in the same currents that move almost everyone else.

A brazen art heist pushes our protagonists to reflect on the choices they've made-and the ones that have been made for them. Set in the near- present, the story turns on the ill-conceived theft of a high-end Jeff Koons sculpture, lifted in plain sight from its perch beside a luxurious mountain home in Park City, Utah, and follows the musings, misadventures, and meeting of minds of a Long Island writer in midlife crisis and the art thief behind the ill conception.

Balloon Dog poses two central questions: Is the transformative power of art enough to lift us from our days? And what is art, anyway?

DANIEL PAISNER is the author or co-author of more than seventy books. As a ghostwriter, he has written more than fifty books in collaboration with athletes, actors, politicians, business leaders, and ordinary individuals with extraordinary stories to tell. Seventeen of his collaborations have reached The New York Times best-seller list. The author of three previous novels-A Single Happened Thing, Mourning Wood, and Obit-he is also the host of the popular podcast As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast. A graduate of Tufts University, with a master's degree in journalism from Boston University, he lives on Long Island and in Park City, Utah, where he enjoys skiing, hiking, kayaking, grandparenting, and aging gracefully.