Fiction endows the thieves of priceless art with both glamour and psychological complexity. Because a stolen work can’t be sold on the open market, the theft of a masterpiece must be a crime of passion rather than pecuniary calculation: A wealthy aesthete covets a work, so he hires someone to steal it, then secrets it away. Or so it would seem.

In fact, an instance of thieves-for-hire stealing a painting for a high-profile client has never come to light, and when art thieves are apprehended, they often turn out to be rather boring, run-of-the-mill criminals. When the Norwegian police identified the mastermind of the 1994 theft of a version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” from Oslo’s National Gallery, he turned out to be not a worldly connoisseur but a soccer player and B-list celebrity turned gangster. He had stolen the painting in the vain hope of somehow selling it and making a profit.

Yet Edward Dolnick’s “The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece” (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95), which relates the tale of the painting’s theft and recovery, nevertheless has an interesting character at its center. That character is not one of the thieves, but the detective who tracked them down.

The crime occurred early on the morning of February 12, 1994, the opening day of the Winter Games in Oslo; in a humiliating touch, the thieves left a postcard that read, “Thanks for the poor security.” At that time Charley Hill was the star of Scotland Yard’s tiny art squad. He had a flair for undercover operations and had just pulled off a sting that recovered a stolen Vermeer. Mr. Hill was immediately drawn into the case, and he soon devised the perfect persona with which to lure the thieves into the open.

Rescue operations like Mr. Hill’s depend on the fact that thieves don’t steal for themselves but will surface to sell a stolen work if they hear there is a potential buyer. So Mr. Hill invented a character and story designed to make dollar signs flash in their eyes: He became “Christopher Roberts,” an employee of the deep-pocketed Getty Museum, who supposedly wanted to ransom “The Scream” so that the National Gallery could loan it to the Getty for an exhibition. With the helpful mediation of a venal art dealer, Mr. Hill was able to recover the painting within three months.

Mr. Dolnick tries to summon suspense in his tale of the operation itself, but Mr. Hill’s plan seems to have proceeded a bit too straightforwardly for the author’s purposes. The more interesting aspects of “The Rescue Artist,” therefore, are the broader discussions of art crime and the author’s attempt to account for why Mr. Hill is so brilliant at his vocation.

Mr. Hill tells Mr. Dolnick that his undercover work allows him an outlet for the darker aspects of his personality, namely his instinct for violence and aggression. He is a self-described “heavy drinker,” and the scenes in which he bonds with members of the criminal underworld all involve the consumption of large quantities of alcohol. Yet he watched his father descend into alcoholism, before being dragged to death by a cab one day when Mr. Hill was a college freshman. Mr. Hill’s observation of his father’s decline seems in part to explain his mixture of compassion and misanthropy, though Mr. Dolnick isn’t subtle either as a psychologist or a stylist.

As for criminal-collector masterminds, Mr. Dolnick acknowledges that though Mr. Hill has never seen one doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Indeed, he points out, even legitimate buyers often hide their trophies away. Bidders at art auctions often remain anonymous, and the ownership and whereabouts of the five most expensive paintings ever bought at auction – two van Goghs, a Renoir, a Rubens, and a Picasso – remain unknown. The Japanese industrialist who purchased two of them hid them in a vault. Then his business collapsed and he died of a stroke; so far, the paintings haven’t been found.

Mr. Dolnick’s story of “The Scream” has a well-known ironic epilogue. Last August, 10 years after the National Gallery recovered its painting, two armed men walked into the Munch Museum, a small museum on the other side of Oslo, and stole two paintings, including another famous version of “The Scream.” That museum recently reopened after a 10-month security overhaul, with so many metal detectors and one-way security doors a local newspaper dubbed it “Fortress Munch.” But the two paintings are still missing.

Ms. Taylor last wrote in these pages on Theater for the Blind’s production of “Oedipus.”