Book Review: Conned by Matthew Klein
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In 2013, I was perusing a book store and came across No Way Back by Matthew Klein. I didn’t even read the blurb because I was hooked simply by reading the front cover. “They know everything. They control everyone. Even you.” I couldn’t resist. And even better, I read the book and loved it. Ever since, I’ve had the rest of his books on my Goodreads “Want to Read” list. So when I came across Conned (also known as Con Ed in some places) in a second-hand book store, I snapped it up.
Conned was Klein’s second book, published in 2007, so it’s nearly 15 years old now. The implausibly named Kip Largo (likely just so Klein can set up Key Largo jokes) has been out of prison for a year after serving a five-year sentence for what was essentially a pyramid scheme. He lives in a dump, works at a dry cleaner and hasn’t seen his now adult son Toby for a while. When Toby shows up and says he’s in trouble, Kip takes him at his word – the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – but he doesn’t have any money and there’s nothing Kip can do about it. He’s trying to put his con days behind him and go straight.
After Toby has his leg broken by the Russian mafia he owes money to, Kip feels guilty and makes them an offer: one last con. It will set him up for life and pay off Toby’s debt a hundred times over. They agree on the condition that if they don’t have the money within two months, they will kill both Kip and Toby. Kip has failed Toby over and over again and he feels he owes his son.
Conveniently, while drinking in a bar, Kip has recently been recognised and offered a job to con a billionaire husband out of a few million by a wife with an unbreakable prenup. He initially said no but it’s perfect for what he’s planning. The con? To convince the husband to invest in technology he doesn’t understand but will seeingly make him a lot of money. Seems simple enough, right?
Actually, it starts to get convoluted from this point. Klein starts out by trying to explain some basic cons and moves onto larger cons and even a historical one to educate the reader who likely doesn’t have that much experience with the industry (and trust me, it’s an industry). Then Kip goes about setting up his con but he never explains too much ahead of time, neither to the readers or any of the other people he brings in to play minor roles (including fake FBI agents, fake programmers, fake marketers, etc). Toby convinces Kip to let him play a role as well, but he keeps Toby just as much in the dark as everyone else.
Eventually, Kip starts to feel like an unreliable narrator. He doesn’t trust anyone and no one trusts him, not even the reader. Is he running a con against a billionaire husband and for the Russian mafia, or against the Russian mafia, or against everybody? Or is he the one being conned?
It should probably be obvious by now that I didn’t enjoy this book as much I liked No Way Back. Part of the problem is that it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for people who are so greedy for a quick buck (or a thousand) that they do really stupid things, like withdrawing huge sums of money from their bank accounts and handing it over to complete strangers on the promise of getting it back with interest. A lot of these scams are also very low tech and in the decade or so since it was published, a bunch of Nigerian princes have taken over the scene and made it a lot more high tech, arm’s length, romantic and devastating.
The character of Kip is, however, very convincing as a conman and Klein says in his endnotes that he did a lot of research. There’s also an author biography that tells us Klein ran an internet company a lot like the one Kip sets up as part of the con, which later went bankrupt before he became a successful writer. Talk about art imitating life.
Ultimately, the ending lacks the poetic justice a story about a con deserves. But Klein’s writing is easy to read and the book is diverting enough as long as you don’t expect too much from it.
In a word: inoffensive.
3 stars
*First published on Goodreads 12 March 2020
