"A professor of linguistics who specialized in underworld argot, Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers, who let him in on not simply their language, but their folk-ways and the astonishing complex and elaborate schemes whereby unsuspecting marks, hooked by their own greed and dishonesty, were "taken off" - i.e. cheated - of thousands upon thousands of dollars. The products of amazing ingenuity, crack timing, and attention to every last detail,...

"Mrs. Loretta Plansky, a recent widow in her seventies, is settling into retirement in Florida while dealing with her 98-year-old father and fielding requests for money from her beloved children and grandchildren. Thankfully, her new hip hasn't changed her killer tennis game one bit. One night Mrs. Plansky is startled awake by a phone call from a voice claiming to be her grandson Will, who desperately needs ten thousand dollars to get out of a jam....

August 1943. Fourteen-year-old Massimo is all alone. Newly orphaned and fleeing from Rome after surviving the American bombing raid which killed his parents, Massimo is attacked by thugs and finds himself bloodied at the base of Montecassino, the hilltop upon which a Benedictine abbey sits in all its imposing glory. It is there, in the abbey's shadow, that a charismatic and eccentric man called Pietro Houdini, the self-proclaimed "master artist and...