Then she began dramatically fainting in front of various noble- women. She started lurking around Versailles, hoping to “accidentally” run across the queen in one of its many hallways. So in order to attract Marie Antoinette’s attention, Jeanne had to get creative. The problem was that everyone else at Versailles was on a similar mission. Queen Marie Antoinette was famous for her charity, and Jeanne was sure that if she could just explain the whole Valois situation to her, the queen would restore her and her family to their old glory. She was trying to creep closer and closer to the center of all wealth: the king and queen of France, who could fulfill all her dreams with just a snap of their fingers. She bought expensive silverware to impress her guests-and then pawned it the very next day. She blew her pension on extravagant outfits. Tori Telfer is a freelance writer who is a) inconsolable at her lack of skateboarding skills, b) obsessed with talking about serial killers at dinner parties, and c) has been published in and around the world wide web on topics from Johnny Depp impersonators to vengeful cowboys in frontier America. She rented rooms in both Paris and Versailles, and Jeanne began pretending to be much richer than she actually was.

(Feb.With a new benefactor at her beck and call, the world was Jeanne’s oyster. Agent: Erin Hosier, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. Assured prose complements the vivid portraits. It wasn’t until 2007 that the New York Times outed Head as a fake who wasn’t even in the country on 9/11. Then there’s Alicia Head, who had a horrifying story of surviving 9/11 that made her famous and the leader of a survivor network.

More recently, Telfer writes, fake spiritualists and mediums have swindled the American public out of $2.1 billion a year, among them Rose Marks, who gave spiritual advice to romance novelist Jude Deveraux to the tune of $17 million from 1991 to 2008.

In the early part of the 20th century, there were hundreds of fake Anastasias, purporting to be the Russian princess, who bilked believers out of money, apartments, cars, and furs. Her subjects range from Jeanne de Saint-Rémy, who engineered a scheme in 18th-century France involving a cardinal, a diamond necklace, and Marie Antoinette that led to a scandal and contributed to the fall of the French monarchy, to Bonny Lee Bakley, who ran a mail-order porn scam, conned actor Robert Blake into marrying her-and wound up murdered for it in 2001. In this compulsively readable account, Telfer ( Lady Killers) delivers a darkly humorous tale of some of the most outrageous con women who ever scammed the public.

Tori telfer books