I had an economics professor in college who always had a bit of larceny in his heart, and one of his favorite sayings was: You've gotta love a good con. Well, I've always applied that principle to books as well: You've gotta love a good con man novel. And Con Ed is a good one.
Kip Largo made a fortune selling "diet decks" (cards with pictures of food on them; deal yourself a hand and you get to eat whatever turns up) on late-night infomercials. The business was going great and the dough was rolling in. But he just couldn't help himself. Kip, you see, is a con man. And he'd rather steal one dollar than make two legitimately. Thus, he lost it all and wound up in prison.
Now Kip's free and he's determined to walk the straight and narrow. Then his good-for-nothing son shows up, in hock to the Russian Mob for some serious cash. The only way Kip can raise the money and pay the debt is to run a con -- and to come up with this kind of money, it's going to have to be a doozy.
Novels like Con Ed are fun because they not only entertain us with their stories of larceny and greed, they also educate us in the ways of the grifter. Kip demonstrates how to read a mark and how to reel him in. He teaches us how to set up a phony business and create a new persona out of whole cloth.
Some of the plotting in Con Ed is a little clunky, and the characters other than Kip can't match him for interest, but first novel hiccups like those are as forgivable as they are common. More importantly, author Matthew Klein knows how to tell a story -- and a good story at that -- and that's no con.
How Klein learned all of this stuff is not revealed. Hopefully he's just really good at doing research, or else maybe he's a very creative guy. Either way, I'm damn sure not going to be buying any diet aids from his any time soon.
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