REVIEW: Perfect Scoundrels

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Perfect Scoundrels: Ally Carter Orchard Books 2013

First an admission and a note to myself, it was probably too long since I’d read the previous book in the ‘Heist Society’ series, so there were a few references to the preceding two books that I knew I wasn’t appreciating properly. (I checked and it was almost four and a half years ago! Definitely too long!) Still, I enjoyed this book overall, so it’s just up to me to get the next book more swiftly and read it more promptly.

I’ve pretty much said before that this series reminds me of Ocean’s Eleven, if Danny Ocean were a teenage girl. Katarina ‘Kat’ Bishop comes from a big family of thieves, and has assembled a crew of peers who use their special skills for mostly honourable purpoes. Kat has decided to devote herself to retrieving items stolen by the Nazis and returning them to their rightful owners.

There’s always been a touch of Catwoman and Bruce Wayne about Kat and the billionaire boy she calls Hale. Note I didn’t describe him as Batman. Hale has been pulled into (or stolen into) a life of cons by Kat, not revenge and vigilanteism. He is now her boyfriend at the beginning of this book, and the parallel is only emphasised as Kat is pulled into the Hale family’s affairs upon the sudden death of Hazel Hale, the only member of the family who really loved Hale. His trusty ‘British’ valet/chauffeur Marcus has always been an Alfred figure, and here we meet Silas Foster, a Hale Industries employee who might as well be called Lucius Fox.

Kat doesn’t fit into the Hales’ world of wealth, but she’s more worried about Hale’s grief taking him away from her. His family call him Scooter or Junior, and he sometimes seems like a stranger to her around them. Oh, and there’s something off about Mrs Hale’s will, which left Hale Industries to Hale, bypassing his cold father, uncle and aunts, in trust until he is twenty-five. He’s taking it as a sign of his grandmother’s love for him and trust in him. How can Kat, wishing she had had a chance to meet Hazel Hale, tell him she thinks the will is faked?
Fortunately, Kat is in a position that most fifteen year olds wouldn’t be: she can do something about it. Soon she’s revisiting the sites of past cons, planning to do the impossible without enough time. But because it’s personal for Hale, she doesn’t tell him the truth at first, and when he finds out, it seems to further the distance between them.

Kat is more sympathetic here than in previous books, a mix of confidence and worry. The girlfriend-boyfriend thing is new. Carter mostly pulls it off, although the reader knows that a con is always coming (I saw through the big one) and that we’re not being told everything until all the tricks are revealed. Perhaps more of an issue is the style. Sentences tend to be short and snappy, the characters banter as much as they talk, which makes the story a little glib, as I’ve complained about before with Carter. And this is in a book that’s discussing grief, mortality – Kat realises that, as she’s coming into her potential, some of the family members who brought her up are getting old – and family. Those themes are more relatable for the preteen/teen readers than the sneaky entrances and jet setting that we’re reading the book for. The high-wire act of the honourable grifters is actually heightened by our heroine being a petite teenager, who can’t be an antiheroine. The book can’t dwell on or ignore the growing suspicion around Mrs Hale’s death.

I continue to enjoy the inexhaustible names for cons the characters suggest, and I think, after basic Googling, that the furniture maker of pieces with secret drawers was made up. I also really liked Kat’s relationship with her cousin Gabrielle, which has come on since ‘Heist Society’. As in that book, there are looming countdowns and a need for Britpicking, but like in ‘Uncommon Criminals’, there is greater gender balance. But I can’t say the title is all that relevant for the content of the story.

[Edited 28/08/24 for typos and flow.]