James Nicoll Reviews

Rebecca Fraimow’s 2024 Lady Eve’s Last Con is a stand-alone science fiction caper novel.

Confidence agents Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have made a tolerable living bilking gullible rich travelers plying the interstellar lanes. Jules made the mistake of falling for her latest mark, Esteban Mendez-Yuki. Jules ended up dumped, heartbroken, and pregnant.

Ruth is determined to provide Jules’ kid with a nest-egg and Jules with revenge by proxy. Victory seems assured! How hard could it be to con one rich egghead?

Step one: appropriate a suitable persona. Evelyn Ojukwu of the Kepler Ojukwu family is ideal. The real Evelyn is laid up in a hospital following a mishap that her family does not want publicized. Even better, Kepler is a month and a half away by the fastest ship. The cover should be good for three months.

Step two: catch Estaban’s attention. Ruth exploits the superficial resemblance between herself and Jules. Simply allow Esteban to angrily confront the con artist who tried to seduce him, then exploit his embarrassment when Estaban realizes the woman he is berating is not the woman he believed her to be.

Ruth’s infallible plan has two tiny flaws. The most immediate is Estaban’s sister Solada Alvaria Mendez-Yuki, Sol to her friends and strangers with a suspicious interest in Esteban. Sol can’t prove that Ruth isn’t who she claims, but Sol is perfectly willing to proceed as though her suspicions about Ruth’s intentions were fact.

If an all-too-observant sister weren’t complication enough, Albert Alonso is also on the scene. Albert Alonso is a member in good standing with the Terran Original Undertakers (TOU), a cooperative business venture an older era would have called ​“a criminal gang.” Like Ruth, the TOU are interested in the Mendez-Yuki fortune.

Ruth sees Albert as a shark to be placated. Thanks to years of hard work on Ruth’s part, Albert sees Ruth as an adorable, sometimes useful ditz. Albert therefore has a proposition for Ruth: assist the TOU to target Sol and the TOU won’t interfere in Ruth’s Esteban-related scheme.

The smart move is to keep Albert happy. There’s a complication. Unlike poor Jules, Ruth isn’t foolish enough to fall for her mark. Ruth is, however, perfectly capable of falling for her mark’s sister, Sol.

~oOo~

I’m not crazy about romance-heavy books. There’s nothing wrong with romance stories, but… there are so many phase diagrams whose stories have yet to be told. The fact that romance stories outsell other genres a million zillion to one suggests I am in the minority here¹.

I selected this work because I wanted to read a novella, ideally one not from Tor. It’s important to remind readers that other publishers publish novellas. The flaw in my plan was that an e‑novel is the same thickness as an e‑novella — the thickness of my ereader — and it didn’t occur to me to check the page count. This is a novel, not a novella.

Do not go into this novel expecting Poul Anderson-level world-building. That said, the detail on which the TOU plan depends is SFnal, not something that could be replaced with a manila envelope. For that matter, don’t go into this expecting Coen Brothers-level of carnage. The TOU may have a fearsome reputation, but they seem to have earned it with suggestive looming.

A cynic might observe that even low-level con artists probably should avoid falling for the target, so the fact both Ruth and Jules manage to do so in fairly short order suggests maybe they should seek out careers other than crime.

Ruth and Jules are under no illusion that they’re criminal super-geniuses one grandiose plan away from untold wealth. For the most part, they’re happy with a steady stream of small-scale cons, because more ambitious schemes could land them in jail or earn them the space version of concrete overshoes. This self-awareness would in other circumstances be a plot-killer, if not for Jules’ impending baby.

The benefit to reading this novel with a novella mind-set is that I can attest it kept my attention despite wildly incorrect expectations about length. Fraimow has a clear idea what she wants to accomplish with her caper novel and accomplishes just that.

Lady Eve’s Last Con is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Perhaps a million zillion is overstating it. You can supply the correct number.