Pretty Things

February 17, 2020
In this mixed heist tale, Brown (Watch Me Disappear) pits two con artists against a socialite, but a shared history makes their job messier than usual. Nina and her boyfriend Lachlan prey on Los Angeles’s young, careless, and wealthy, taking largely unmissed goods from their homes that can be resold for small fortunes. When Nina’s mom learns that her cancer has returned and the police turn up investigating Nina and Lachlan’s crime spree, the couple decide to leave town and take a swing at an instant payday—the $1 million Nina knows is in a safe in the Lake Tahoe mansion of her ex-boyfriend, Benny, which is currently occupied by his Instagram-influencer sister, Vanessa. But their efforts to scam Vanessa turn up more surprises than they expected, and Nina’s attempts to hide her identity blow up. Despite a catchy opening, the stakes fade and the narrative flags during Nina and Lachlan’s overlong ruse, and long flashbacks and shifts in perspective drag out what quickly becomes a predictable storyline. There’s promise here, but many readers will find their interest waning.

Julia Whelan and Lauren Fortgang perform a near-perfect duet narrating this utterly absorbing psychological thriller. Whelan's Nina is a grifter. She is bright and shrewd and is ready to go straight, but she needs one big score to pay for cancer treatments for her charming con woman mother. Nina's mark is Vanessa, a socialite media influencer, apparently all entitlement and vanity, whose family once did a terrible thing to teenaged Nina. Or so Nina believes. Fortgang gives Vanessa a slightly different timbre from Nina, somehow shallower and more helpless but not especially sympathetic--or so it seems. Somehow the worst people come across as most appealing, a hugely effective diversion as you unravel who the real cons and marks are. A winning production. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine