High-Stakes Summer Thriller, THE LIES I TELL by Julie Clark

Most of the great confidence men (con artists) of mystery and thriller fiction are exactly that -- men. In THE LIES I TELL, Julie Clark establishes two powerful and compelling women willing to play any necessary game to achieve their goals, and turns the tables on the classic form. Moreover, Clark lets these women address us in alternating first person, telling their own stories. Yet she still manages to hide her final twists until they become startling and irredeemable.

Meg Upton is obviously out to manipulate situations and set up her targeted men for pain and loss. She's blunt  about her methods:

I spend hundreds of hours on observation and research. Profiling the different people in your life, finding the one I can befriend, the one who will lead me to you. When I'm done, I know everything I possibly can about you, and most of the people around you. By the time you're saying nice to meet you, I've already known you for months.

Does this worry you? It should.

Kat Roberts, an investigative reporter, has been watching for traces of Meg's operations, and hopes to save her finances through an exposé of the high-rolling criminal. But Kat's life has stresses that make her career increasingly difficult, even hazardous. The closer she gets to Meg -- who knows herself well enough to say "I was born to be a grifter" -- the more Kat's got to face her own mistakes and the way she's allowed life to run another sort of con on her.

Still, it's the conniving Meg who most often puts it all on the line:

I'm not a fool. I know Kat plans to write about me, exposing who I am and what I do. I see beneath her soft sympathy ... I have a plan too, and Kat will be a useful part of it. It's easy to pull her in and feed her the pieces I need her to have.

Does Kat guess this? Her boyfriend warns her: "A con artist isn't going to just let you walk away. She's going to want to make you pay."

Clark's gift lies in holding each character's needs so close to the surface that a surge of empathy for either is immediately countered by a wave of concern over what threat each of these women will impose on the other. As with her earlier suspense, The Last Flight, this author pulls the threads of tension tighter with each new action and revelation, until, like a deck of cards cut and arched upward against the fingers, the patterns suddenly rearrange in a shattering set of revelations.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.