Never judge a crook by her cover.

Julep Dupree tells lies. A lot of them. She’s a con artist, a master of disguise, and a sophomore at Chicago’s swanky St. Agatha High, where her father, an old-school grifter with a weakness for the ponies, sends her so she can learn to mingle with the upper crust. For extra spending money, Julep runs petty scams for her classmates while dodging the dean of students and maintaining an A+ (okay, A-) average. She's a fixer, and she's good at it. But it's not what she wants. And soon, she'll hang up her grifter skills for good.

But when she comes home one day to a ransacked apartment and her father missing, Julep’s carefully laid plans for going straight start to unravel. Even with help from St. Agatha’s resident Prince Charming, Tyler Richland, and her loyal hacker, Sam, Julep struggles to trace her dad’s trail of clues through a maze of creepy stalkers, hit attempts, family secrets, and worse, the threat of foster care. With her literal life at stake, Julep will need to use every grift in the book to find and save her dad before his mark finds--and eliminates--her.

Julep Dupree is a lot of things, but one thing she isn't is okay.

Dealing with the emotional aftermath of the death of someone close to her is proving difficult, especially for someone who isn't supposed to care. And worse, Sam Seward, her BFF and hacker--the one person she could always rely on--has abandoned her for (of all things) military school. Then a friend of a friend hires Julep's team to stop a cadre of cyber bullies, forcing Julep to run an impossible con. Nothing Julep has been through could have prepared her for the truth behind the bullying, or for the demons she'll have to face to save her friends.

Meanwhile, grifters can't have all the fun.

Sam Seward is a hacker, not a con artist. And after the events that landed him in a military school, he’s more than happy to leave the grifting to the expert he left back in Chicago. But when a classmate begs him to help her retrieve something one of the school teachers stole from her, Sam’s staunch belief in justice won’t let him turn her down. He forms a new crew and plots a heist of his own, but he’s not Julep, and something about this case just smells wrong. Will he be able to pull off a con that even Julep would never attempt?

Julep thought surviving the mob was hard…

...but surviving her guilt is another thing entirely. Running her investigation agency is Julep's only distraction from her losses over the last few months. With a few new minions on Julep's payroll, she's been taking on various investigation jobs, including one for Mrs. Antolini--the wife of a computer engineer arrested for embezzling a whole lot of money from his company. She's convinced he did it at the behest of the New World Initiative, a leadership cult that just so happens to be run by a grifter who supposedly went straight. Julep's not so sure she wants the case--going up against any grifter, even an ex-grifter, is no joke--but Mrs. Antolini's story links to a mysterious blue fairy, and potentially to Julep's own missing mother.

To complicate matters, someone's put a contract on Julep's head, so even if she manages to take down the con artist at the top of the New World Initiative, she may not live to tell the tale. With a war on multiple fronts, and her enigmatic shadow, Dani Ivanov, as her only protection, Julep must face the ghosts of her past to even have a chance at surviving the present.

Will Julep escape the clutches of everyone who wants her dead? Worse, will she escape the burgeoning feelings she's been catching for her mob-enforcer bodyguard?

What was lost must stay that way.

Dani left Julep behind to secure Julep’s safety, but that doesn’t mean Dani’s work is done. In the spirit of keeping one’s enemies closer, she’s making sure Petrov doesn’t go anywhere near Julep or her friends, especially when Petrov’s mysterious plans bring his crew—and Dani—back to Chicago. She isn’t in town long before her ex-girlfriend Han cashes in the favor Dani owes her, sending her off on a delivery errand, except the package is three young children. The mission goes sideways, turning an easy handoff into a frantic escape, and forcing Dani to decide how much she is willing to risk to save three small strangers from a dismal fate.

Grifters' hearts don't bleed...or do they?

It's now been three months since Dani left, and Julep's driving herself to an early grave with all the dangerous schemes she's undertaking to try and find her. She can't sleep, she can't focus, and she sure as hell can't grift. Then one night she gets a call from an unexpected young client, who believes his dad is being catfished by someone with ties to a murder. Unfortunately, no one he's gone to for help will take him seriously. Will Julep be able to put her heart on hold long enough to help him? And if she does, will she be able to solve the case before she becomes the murderer's next target?