as Lana Popovic, she is also the author of YA novels Wicked Like a Wildfire, Fierce Like a Firestorm, Blood Countess, and Poison Priestess. Harper was born in Serbia and lived in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania before moving to the United States, where she now lives in Naperville, Illinois, with her family. Jilly Gagnon is the author of eight novels, most recently What if it's You? Her humor writing, personal essays, and op-eds have appeared in Newsweek, Elle, Vanity Fair, Boston Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with her family and two black cats.
Harper and Gagnon's new mystery is Cards on the Table.
At CrimeReads the authors tagged five "delightful stories of grifters, tricksters, and cons," including:
Frank Abagnale, Catch Me If You CanRead about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.
It’s impossible to pull together a list of ultimate con artist stories without a hat tip to Frank Abagnale’s memoir of hisyears-long series of scams, forgeries, and international run-ins with the law. The ultimate charismatic con, Abagnale pulled off his many heists with breathtaking chutzpah, earning millions from check forgeries, passing himself off variously as a hospital supervisor, an attorney, a college professor, and a PanAm pilot—committing so fully to the bit that he actually co-piloted a commercial plane. Perhaps most impressive of all, he claims to have managed all these feats before he even reached his twenty-first birthday.
As charming a writer as he must have been when practicing his first “art,” Abagnale’s memoir reads like fiction…and some of it might be (after all, he was in the business of fakery for years). Honestly, though, does it really matter? Whether or not every heist he describes is fully “true,” the story is unputdownable.
--Marshal Zeringue
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