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Tell them Daniel Smith sent you.
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa follows a web of curators, soldiers, spies, politicians, and art dealers as the world’s most coveted painting becomes the prize in a wartime heist at North Carolina’s grandest estate. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The idea for The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa gelled after I watched a television special about German U-boats off the Florida coast during WWII. Soon after, my wife and I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. The tour guide mentioned that the National Gallery had stored many paintings at Biltmore House during WWII. The third input came from my background. I’m retired from the U.S. Navy and a military historian. I already knew that Adolph Hitler and Hermann Goring considered themselves art collectors. Those three “inputs” led me to produce an outline for my novel, “The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa.” After producing my first short outline, the idea floated around in my mind for twenty years before I finally got serious and wrote something every day for seven months before finishing my first draft. My wife, daughter, and son are all excellent editors and went through each chapter as I finished them. After incorporating input from my beta readers, I contracted with a professional editor and spent another couple of months rewriting to incorporate his valuable suggestions.
How did you research the logistics of moving, guarding, and potentially stealing a masterpiece during wartime?
I found some photos of the moving vans that moved the art pieces from the National Gallery to Biltmore House. With my military background, the Army squad and State Police activity guarding the estate came easily. Deciding where to store the artwork required some research on the rooms available at Biltmore. I needed the curators and Declan Donahue, the handicapped Army captain, to be near the storage area.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
I spent a good deal of my research time examining how Da Vinci devoted so many years to painting the Mona Lisa. He never considered the painting finished. I also conducted extensive research into how those in the art world detect forgeries. With today’s detection methods, detecting forgeries is much faster and more accurate. That was not the case in 1941 and before.
Researching prisoner-of-war camps in the United States during WWII was an area I was not well-versed in. I knew we had a few camps, but I didn’t know there was one in East Tennessee before. That made the journey to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, after the prisoner swap, more straightforward.
The Biltmore itself feels almost like a character. What drew you to its architecture, history, and hidden spaces as the center of the story?
The book didn’t start out that way, but as I researched the history and layout of the Biltmore Mansion, I became captivated by the estate’s grandeur and scale. George Vanderbilt built a small town to house the workers and their families needed to build Biltmore. To this day, Biltmore, with 250 rooms, remains the largest private home in the United States. Anyone with the chance to visit the estate should certainly take the time to do so. Tell them Daniel Smith sent you.
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In 1941, France’s national treasure, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting is moved to the Biltmore House
near Asheville, North Carolina, for safekeeping.
German General Hermann Goring hears about this move and sends a special Luftwaffe detachment to America by submarine.
Their mission is to break out a German art expert from an American POW camp and continue to Asheville to steal the Mona Lisa, leaving a masterful forgery in its place.
Unbeknownst to the Germans, a second scoundrel has a similar plan in place. However, while his wealth may provide him with the resources to succeed, his greed may be his undoing.
Will this villainy succeed? Only a disabled Army Air Corps captain and a French art curator from the Louvre stands in their way…
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa is a World War II heist novel built around a terrific what-if: what if the Mona Lisa, moved to America for safekeeping, ended up hidden at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina? The setup is part art-history puzzle, part wartime thriller, with the book opening under the warning, “Thou shalt not covet…” and then spending the rest of the story showing how many people fail that test.
Author Daniel D. Smith, Sr. gives the novel a roomy, procedural feel. We spend time with curators, soldiers, German operatives, Biltmore staff, politicians, and art dealers, so the heist feels less like a single caper and more like a web of errands, loyalties, favors, and bad choices. Captain Declan Donahue, with his damaged body, practical mind, and Chinese puzzle box, is one of the book’s most grounded figures. Rolf Gunther, meanwhile, gives the German plotline a steady engine as he’s tasked with the blunt mission: “I plan to steal the real Mona Lisa from an estate near Asheville.”
What the book does best is turn logistics into drama. Moving paintings, choosing rooms, guarding stairways, swapping uniforms, rowing through fog, hiding in blind spots, and protecting a crate all become suspense beats. The Biltmore setting helps a lot because the house feels like a character: grand, complicated, full of corridors, service spaces, rooms, and secrets. The heist depends as much on architecture and routine as it does on bravery.
The novel also has a fun fascination with copies, authenticity, and who gets to decide what’s real. The ending’s explanation of the different Mona Lisas gives the story a satisfying puzzle-box quality, tying together the German operation, Buchard’s choices, Daniel Roberts’s private scheme, and Senator Wellington’s greed. That final sorting-out is one of the book’s pleasures because it makes the whole story feel like an art-world shell game with wartime stakes.
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa is a patient and detail-rich historical heist novel with an old-fashioned adventure rhythm. It’s at its best when it’s following people doing specific work under pressure: guarding, forging, planning, carrying, deceiving, and improvising. The result is a book about obsession dressed up as a caper, where the Mona Lisa is both a painting and a temptation that reveals what everyone around her wants most.
