The New York Times bestseller • One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • One of NPR's Best Books of the Year • Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly
“[A] brilliant new entry in Smith’s catalog . . . The Fraud is not a change for Smith, but a demonstration of how expansive her talents are.” —Los Angeles Times
From acclaimed...

From a famous actor and an experienced journalist, a wildly entertaining debunking of cryptocurrency, one of the greatest frauds in history and on course for a spectacular crash
At the height of the pandemic, TV star Ben McKenzie (The O.C., Gotham) was the perfect mark for cryptocurrency: a dad stuck at home with some cash in his pocket, worried about his family, armed with only the vague notion that people were making heaps...

"The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer...

In this propulsive debut thriller, two women with deep secrets are thrown together by an unexpected meeting that plunges both their lives into chaos. But it's a sick little girl whose fate hangs in the balance. Motherhood is tough. But then, so is daughterhood. When we first meet Claire, she's living in Sedona, Arizona with her boyfriend Cal and ducking calls from her mother. Her mom is a world class psychic on the East Coast and Claire doesn't...

A story of faith and fraud in post-Civil War America, told through the lens of a photographer who claimed he could capture images of the dead In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer," William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential...

"A darkly comic inquiry into how to fake your own death, the disappearance industry, and the lengths to which people will go to be reborn. Is it still possible to fake your own death in the twenty-first century? With six figures of student loan debt, Elizabeth Greenwood was tempted to find out." --

Harry Touchstone is nothing but a small-town detective who works mostly on insurance cases for local companies. Then, his friend dies, and Harrys life turns upside-down. His murdered pal was a graduate student writing her thesis on corruption in the building industry. Her researcher is found dead, too, and Harry makes it his business to solve the case. The case leads him from Harbour City to Vancouver, from arson to more murders. Unbeknownst to him,...

The Federal Trade Commissions yearly report for 2007 stated that over 30 million people in the United States were victimized by some type of fraudulent crime. Over 9 million people saw their personal identities stolen and used by a fraud perpetrator. Millions of others---including businesses---saw their financial accounts compromised by a fraud perpetrator. Strictly speaking, fraud is big business. Are you one of its customers? Everyone is vulnerable...

More than 300 years ago, Taiwan was a controversial topic in London, thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born there. He made up an entire fantasy for the island with a fake history, a fake language and long list of outrageous claims that made his book, A Description of Formosa, a publishing sensation in London in 1704. Even the Bishop of London swallowed Psalmanazar's story and invited him to teach his (fake)...