After a heist she planned lands two men she loves in prison, a woman flees Paris and assumes a new identity, furtively checking news from her hometown as her web of deception unravels.

A beautiful con artist relates her turn-of-the-century escapades that took her around the world as she was being doggedly pursued by a Pinkerton Agency detective.

On the run from two bounty hunters in the Australian outback of 1921, Jessie reflects on her past as a circus rider, horse thief, cattle rustler, and convict while determinedly struggling to reunite with her child.

The art of the con has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are some of the best-- or worst. Telfer introduces us to a host of lady swindlers whose scams ranged from the outrageous to the deadly. Among them: In 1700s Paris, Jeanne de Saint-Rémy scammed the royal jewelers out of a necklace made from six hundred and forty-seven diamonds by pretending she was best friends with Queen Marie Antoinette. Cassie Chadwick got banks...

"Eighteen-year-old Stella Sandell stands accused of the brutal murder of a man almost fifteen years her senior. She is an ordinary teenager from an upstanding local family. What reason could she have to know a shady businessman, let alone to kill him? Stella's father, a pastor, and mother, a criminal defense attorney, find their moral compasses tested as they defend their daughter, while struggling to understand why she is a suspect. Told in an unusual...

Sophie Porter is the last person in the world you'd expect to be stealing Renaissance masterpieces--and that's exactly why she's so good at it. Slipping objects out of her husband's office at the Philadelphia Museum of Art satisfies something deep inside, during a time in her life when satisfactions are few and far between. Selling the treasures also happens to keep their house out of foreclosure--a house that means everything to Sophie. But the FBI...

"Adele grew up in the shadows--first watching from backstage at her mother's Parisian dance halls, then wandering around the gloomy, haunted rooms of her father's manor. When she's finally sent away to boarding school in London, she's happy to enter the brightly lit world of society girls and their wealthy suitors. Yet there are shadows there, too. Many of the men that try to charm Adele's new friends do so with dark intentions. After a violent assault,...

In 1920s London, pickpocket Alice Diamond scrambles to survive in her gritty neighborhood. With her father in prison and her brother in debt to a crime syndicate, she struggles to protect her father's territory. Recruited by Mary Carr, Alice joins a female gang, the Forty Elephants, and tastes success. But it's not long before she wants more--no matter the cost.