Confidence tricksters are always fascinating characters. Florence Livesey’s life couldn’t be invented in a novel because no-one would find it believable. To give some idea of what it’s about, here is the blurb from the book’s cover:
 
“An attractive young woman from a respectable middle-class family in Manchester, she had over 40 aliases, eight official marriages, four children and five divorces. Her story stretches from industrial England to the French Riviera, from Ireland to New York, Shanghai, New Zealand, the Isle of Man and across Australia. Ethel claimed she was a cotton heiress, wartime nurse, casino hostess, stowaway, artist, opera singer, gambler, spy, close friend of the King, air raid warden, charity queen and even wife of Australian test cricketer Jack Fingleton.
 
When her career imploded (with the abandonment of her glittering society marriage in post-war Sydney just two hours before the guests were due to arrive), the story of the Amazing Mrs Livesey was blazoned across newspapers around the world. But what was fact and what was fiction?”
 
The author, journalist Freda Marnie Nicholls, has done an epic amount of research in tracking Florence’s career and making chronological sense of it, a brilliant project for which she must be congratulated. She has used the style of writing that now comes under the banner of “creative non-fiction”, setting out facts in a journalistic style where the truth is known but using fictional dialogue based on circumstantial evidence elsewhere. For the most part it works really well, but the last third of the book is taken up with the massive amount of arrests, litigation and trials, which are presumably taken verbatim from the actual court transcripts, and it becomes a glaze-inducing slog trying to keep track of the aliases, the assets and non-assets and circumstances under which money was owed to, and by whom. What is surprising is the comparatively small amount of time Florence spent behind bars considering the crimes of which she was guilty.
 
Like all con merchants, she must have had a very persuasive manner and gave Oscar-winning performances in persuading people to part with their cash and believe her crocodile tears. She bamboozled women as well as men. What is even more bizarre, when her career hit the headlines in Sydney, people still came forward believing her sob stories. They offered her accommodation and lent her money - and men still offered to marry her, even when she was well past her prime and weighed more than 19 stone.
 
There isn’t much psychological profiling in the book, so why she behaved as she did isn’t really explored in much detail. Perhaps she was just one of those people born amoral or incapable of real feelings or sensitivity towards others. Cheating adults is all very well, but her worst crimes in my eyes were that she abandoned her children any time she felt like it. Even when she lost her only daughter as a baby, she seemed to soon bounce back and carry on as before.

While I enjoyed learning about Florence to some extent, she is not a woman who deserves any sympathy and I am full of admiration for her son Frank, who was brought up in foster care but was determined to give his own children a secure and loving family life. 

Three and a half stars.
 
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The great cover and snappy tagline captured my attention. One lied. One died. Hard to resist!

This is a tangled twins mystery with a Gen Y cast that purposely all look similar to one another, with fair hair and cute ski noses (a description repeated just a wee bit too often) and who drink a lot of wine and never seem to finish a meal. Their lives are complicated with messy relationships and dark hidden secrets.
 
Abi is a woman teetering on the edge, continuing to grieve for her identical twin sister Lucy who was killed in a car accident while Abi was driving. She also had another relationship that ended badly which caused her to attempt suicide, resulting in ongoing psychiatric treatment. While trying to get her life back on track, she moves away from Balham, London to the city of Bath.
 
Beatrice and Ben are the set second of twins: a dynamic and beautiful couple with wealth, a gorgeous house and designer label clothes, who surround themselves with a group of artistic friends and give fantastic parties. Abi is captivated when she and Beatrice seem to hit it off and before long Abi is invited to move into the house when one of the tenants leaves. Although it’s against the house rules, she starts to get emotionally involved with Ben. And it’s then that creepy things start happening: some of Abi’s letters from Lucy go missing, a dead bird is found in her bed, she is accused of stealing some jewellery. Could it be the increasingly jealous Beatrice’s doings, or is it one of the other tenants, like Cass, who has a major crush on Beatrice?
 
As this novel has been compared to others like The Girl on a Train, which I didn’t like too much (earlier review here), I was a bit wary at the beginning but by the end, I liked this much better and it did keep me glued to the chair without the need to over-analyse what I was reading. There are places where a brisk edit would have sharpened it even more, but the resolution was very neatly put together and the last couple of pages cemented my suspicions that not even the alleged victims in this novel are people you would want to know or have as your close neighbours.
 
(Many thanks to edelweiss above the treeline for providing a free download for review.)

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