This is an absolute must read for those of us who choose to spend our “me time” sitting on the couch watching episode after episode of Deadly Women, Snapped, or similar television shows. Tori Telfer’s new collection of stories, Confident Women, will feature some names many of us are familiar with, but also many “swindlers, grifters, and shapeshifters of the female persuasion” that have previously stayed under the radar. Fascinating, entertaining, and thoroughly researched, Confident Women will have the reader doing a double-take more than once at these outlandish women, and the circumstances that gained each of them a level of notoriety.
Telfer has included both historical and contemporary women in her book, and all of them have had wild and crazy lives (and sometimes deaths). Cleverly alternating between touching and hilarious in her details, Telfer pulls no punches in describing what these women did, who they did it to, and when it’s known, why each did what they did.
Beginning with Jeanne De Saint-Remy, who went by the alias Comtesse de La Motte in the 1750’s when she scammed the French royal jewellers out of a necklace with over 600 diamonds in it, and concluding with Sante Kimes, who was sentenced to life plus 125 years in the early 2000’s, Confident Women is divided by types of crimes (or types of criminals). It can easily be picked up to read about one or two random cases or can be read cover to cover. The audible version is also fantastic, narrated by Jamie Lamchick who is perfect for these darkly humorous tales.
Telfer outlines an incredible history of scams and scammers, highlighting their charisma, creativity, and audacity. From a show dog thief, a fake doctor, a forger, and so much more, Confident Women examines how these outlandish women have continues to dupe their victims.
Confident Women is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
Will you be picking up Confident Women? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A thoroughly entertaining and darkly humorous roundup of history’s notorious but often forgotten female con artists and their bold, outrageous scams—by the acclaimed author of Lady Killers.
From Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey to Frank Abagnale and Charles Ponzi, audacious scams and charismatic scammers continue to intrigue us as a culture. As Tori Telfer reveals in Confident Women, the art of the con has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are some of the best—or worst.
In the 1700s in 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.
In the mid-1800s, sisters Kate and Maggie Fox began pretending they could speak to spirits and accidentally started a religious movement that was soon crawling with female con artists. A gal calling herself Loreta Janeta Velasquez claimed to be a soldier and convinced people she worked for the Confederacy—or the Union, depending on who she was talking to. Meanwhile, Cassie Chadwick was forging paperwork and getting banks to loan her upwards of $40,000 by telling people she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter.
In the 1900s, a 40something woman named Margaret Lydia Burton embezzled money all over the country and stole upwards of forty prized show dogs, while a few decades later, a teenager named Roxie Ann Rice scammed the entire NFL. And since the death of the Romanovs, women claiming to be Anastasia have been selling their stories to magazines. What about today? Spoiler alert: these “artists” are still conning.
Confident Women asks the provocative question: Where does chutzpah intersect with a uniquely female pathology—and how were these notorious women able to so spectacularly dupe and swindle their victims?
