The Grifter’s Daughter: Vol 1-6, AKA The Dani Silver series
Duane Lindsay 1962 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 2, 2022
From the Goodreads blurb page: “WITH SO MANY DISHONEST MARKS NEEDING TO BE SCAMMED, AN AVENGING ANGEL HAS NEVER BEEN SO DELICIOUSLY CROOKED!
“It’s not the money. Dani Silver, the second-best living con artist (the first being her father and mentor, Leroy “Pops” Amadeus Logan) could have had a life of luxury with her billionaire fiancé, but there are just so many people who really—really—deserve to be fleeced. So, she scammed her clean-living sweetie out of a million dollars in seed money, and took off to “do good” – her version of it,”
Good caper stories are always a fun read, and the Dani Silver series has six of them, most with multiple capers. Dani (the most frequently pseudonym she uses in the series) is brash, inventive, and well trained in the art of making and then setting up a mark. She does have her flaws, of course. She’s a bit slapdash in her preparations for a Long Con, relying heavily (sometimes too heavily) on her cohorts, who display varying degrees of reliability and competence. While she has “known associates” that she largely inherited from her semi-retired father, much of each given book’s build-up is a “getting the band back together” situation where she sorts out the right people for the specific job. She sometimes makes a mark, and then realizes that that she is targeting the wrong person. Well, a con that went without complications wouldn’t be nearly as much fun, would it?
Dani and her cohorts start out somewhat stereotypical, but over six books each has room to grow, or in some instances, decay. The change in Dani is particularly notable, since she starts out with the arrogant assumption that it’s ok to steal from baddies to her own Mitchell-and-Webb moment where she goes, “Are we the baddies?”
The plots are inventive (a must in this genre) and well-paced. There’s more than a bit of truly solid drama about.
Lindsay does miss a few spots. Silver is supposed to excel at cold reading (Sherlock Holmes: “You Have Been in Afghanistan, I Perceive.”) but Lindsay sometimes neglects to have her explain to a sidekick how she did it, which is always the most entertaining part of that sequence. He also could use a copy editor, as typos and misstatements show up (Bugatti, for instance, isn’t defunct, but is in fact a going concern and still makes incredible, if spendy, vehicles.)
But these are essentially quibbles. None are serious enough to throw the reader out of the required suspension of disbelief. If you pick up the series (and all six volumes are available on Amazon’s Kindle) expecting a lot of charm, humor, suspense and intrigue, that’s exactly what you are going to get, and you’ll have a delightful time with it.