"Story of three women married in succession to the same man--a charismatic opportunist named Ken Kimble"--Cover.

While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true conmen -- the Bernie Madoffs, the Jim Bakkers, the Lance Armstrongs -- are elegant, outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust. How do they do it? Why are they successful? And what keeps us falling for it, over and over again? From multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes to small-time frauds, Konnikova pulls together a selection of stories to demonstrate what all cons share...

"Some women get everything. Some women get everything they deserve. Amber Patterson is fed up. She's tired of being a nobody: a plain, invisible woman who blends into the background. She deserves more--a life of money and power like the one blond-haired, blue-eyed goddess Daphne Parrish takes for granted. To everyone in the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut, Daphne--a socialite and philanthropist--and her real-estate mogul husband, Jackson,...

After unscrupulous collector S. Wendell Palamino cons him out of a valuable baseball card, sixth-grader Griffin Bing puts together a band of misfits to break into Palomino's heavily guarded store and steal the card back, planning to use the money to finance his father's failing invention, the SmartPick fruit picker.

"Harry Booth started stealing at nine to keep a roof over his ailing mother's head, slipping into luxurious, empty homes at night to find items he could trade for precious cash. When his mother finally succumbed to cancer, he left Chicago--but kept up his nightwork. Wandering from the Outer Banks to Savannah to New Orleans, he dons new identities and stays careful, observant, distant. He can't afford to attract attention--or get attached. Still, he...

"When seventeen-year-old Nora O'Malley, the daughter of a con artist, is taken hostage in a bank heist, every secret she is keeping close begins to unravel"--OCLC.

Two women--a former detective and a dangerous con artist--go head-to-head in a twisting game of cat and mouse. "Mickey Gibson, single mother and former detective, leads a hectic life similar to that of many moms: juggling the demands of her two small children with the tasks of her job working remotely for ProEye, a global investigation company that hunts down wealthy tax and credit cheats. When Mickey gets a call from a colleague named Arlene Robinson,...

"Step into The City of Brass, the spellbinding debut from S. A. Chakraborty--an imaginative alchemy of The Golem and the Jinni, The Grace of Kings, and Uprooted, in which the future of a magical Middle Eastern kingdom rests in the hands of a clever and defiant young con artist with miraculous healing gifts. Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she's a con woman of unsurpassed talent....

Wily con artist Locke Lamora has come up with an ingenious scheme targeting Sinspire, a nine-story palace of gambling and all forms of debauchery in the exotic city of Tal Verrar, but somehow the con does not go as planned.

Stuck at the lake in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, Drew and her younger sister and brother struggle to stay together after their manipulative, con artist mother dies, which they can only do if they can keep her death a secret. Heidi Hill has been juggling shady side hustles for all of Drew's life, and Drew knows that when she's asked to do "one thing" it really means all the necessary things her mother thinks are boring. Which includes taking...