deception
Deception by stealth: the scammer’s long game
Swindled out of almost $100,000, Johnathan Walton warns of the insidious strategies lasting years of the really determined con artist
A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed
His capricious father’s will leaves a young English doctor needing to find a wife within two days and seven hours of his return home from revolutionary France
A meeting of misfits: Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed
An unlikely friendship develops between a taciturn local youth and a fast-talking American film-maker in a grim coastal town in postwar Britain
Who’s deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed
A struggling widow hooks up with a serial confidence trickster in a novel as witty and ruthlessness as its Georgian setting
The Bloomsbury Group’s precarious paradise
The latest biography of Vanessa Bell explores her domestic and artistic radicalism but avoids the central contradiction of her life: deceiving her daughter Angelica for years over her parentage
Outlandish epic: Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, reviewed
Spanning three generations of Sicilian women, this family saga of honour, deception and class politics is also a study in morality and the petty ways in which it is eroded
Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed
Posing as social services employees, two female ex-cons talk their way into the homes of elderly widows in order to drug them and steal their valuables
The shocking truth about adulterated wine: it was delicious
Provided it wasn’t actually poisonous, a beefed-up burgundy in the 1970s was often preferred to a weedy pure vintage pinot noir, says Rebecca Gibb
A glorious tale of greed
Promising his investors dazzling riches with his tale of hidden Ghanaian gold, the charismatic John Ackah Blay-Miezah pulled off one of the most brazen scams of the past century
The devil comes calling
The sinister Sergeant Bertrand arrives in a ‘provincial, mediocre’ Russian town to wreak havoc in the lives of a couple mourning the loss of their son
Only one half of the story
As introductions go, ‘My name is Agnès, but that is not important’ does not have quite the same confidence as…
The mask of deception
Talbot Kydd, film producer; Anny Viklund, American actress; Elfrida Wing, novelist; these make the trio of the title. Private lives…
The disappearing acts of Joseph Gray, master of military camouflage
On a night in Paris in 1914, Gertrude Stein was walking with Picasso when the first camouflaged trucks passed by.…
What Muslims think
Polls suggesting that they sympathise with terrorists are misleading
The worm turns
Something odd happened between the advance publicity for this book and its printed appearance. Trailed as addressing the troubled history…
