Warner Bros has hired Ben Affleck to rewrite, direct and star in a big screen adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel The Prince of Thieves. The film adaptation will be released under the title The Town. The project was originally set up with Unfaithful director Adrian Lyne. Affleck will do a rewrite on the latest screenplay draft which was co-authored by Peter Craig and Chuck Hogan. Affleck will play a career thief who falls in love with the manager of a bank he robbed.

The film is set in Charlestown, MA, which might further explain Affleck’s interest/involvement. I, like many others, was extremely impressed by Affleck’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone. And you can’t forget that he also won an academy award for co-writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting.

The official description of the book follows: The men wear masks. Their guns are drawn on the bank manager. She nervously recites the alarm code, and the tumblers within the huge vault fall. The timing and execution are brilliant. It could be the perfect heist. But as the huge sum of cash is stolen, so too is one man’s heart — and that man is the Prince of Thieves…

Charlestown, a blue-collar Boston neighborhood, produces more bank robbers and armored car thieves than any square mile in the world. In this gripping, intricately plotted thriller, Claire Keesey, the branch manager for a Boston bank and one of an influx of young professionals chipping away at the neighborhood’s insularity, is taken hostage during a robbery. She is released, but Doug MacRay, the brains behind the tough, tight-knit crew of thieves, can’t get her out of his mind. Tracking her down without his mask and gun, Doug introduces himself, and as soon as he and Claire meet, their mutual attraction is undeniable — as are the risks of a relationship.

Meanwhile, Doug’s crew pulls off another audacious, meticulously planned job. Frustrated by their ingenuity and brazen ambition, FBI Agent Adam Frawley begins to zero in on Doug and his pals — and against his own better judgment, he, too, develops more than a professional interest in Claire.

Under pressure from Frawley’s ever-closer investigation, Doug imagines a life for himself away from bank robberies and Charlestown. But before that can happen, the crew learns that there may be a way to rob Boston’s venerable baseball stadium, Fenway Park. It’s a magnificently dangerous and utterly irresistible opportunity — yet for Doug, pursuing his former hostage may be the most dangerous act of all…

Chuck Hogan’s brash tale of four men — thieves, rivals, friends — being hunted through the streets of Boston by a tenacious FBI agent, and the woman who may destroy them all, is a spectacular, stylish, heart-pounding thriller.