Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

You can’t con an honest man.

A couple of years ago I was backstage at BookExpo America in New York City getting ready for a panel with Megan Abbott and Ruth Ware, among others, and the conversation turned to confidence games. Maybe I tossed the topic out there because it had been on my mind. I’d been puzzling over something I’d heard about the nature of the con — and the conned. It was the idea that “you can’t con an honest man.” Megan Abbott said, and I’m paraphrasing because this was a while ago, “Oh, I don’t know about that. That sounds like victim-blaming to me.” Was that true? I wondered. So that conversation turned around in my mind for a while, and I started researching the various elements of the con, as well as the psychology of the con artist, and why very smart people who should know better fall for all sorts of scams. This is usually how things go for me, a spark, a lot of research, and then a character voice. In the case of CONFESSIONS ON THE 7:45, the first voice I heard was Pearl, a troubled girl who grows into a dangerous woman with a taste for chaos. That said, the book is not exactly about con artists. It’s about chance encounters, and layers of identity, about the little lies we tell each other and ourselves, and how easy it is, with the tug of a single thread, to unravel our carefully constructed lives.