Earnest Money: 9

Marlo Quint runs small, clean cons and keeps one rule: she never works the grieving. She takes the greedy, the vain, the ones who knew better - four thousand at a clip, no leak, no floor, no rent. Then a phone call tells her the only man who ever let her hold the pen died broke in the dirt of a fake-lake desert development, convicted for a fraud she helped design and walked away from eighteen years ago. She drives back into Cholla Vista as a widow named Meg Dunn, hunting the founding papers that might still tie her hand to a dead man's ruin. What she finds is a self-made prophet selling salvation by the lot, a floor boss who prices everyone she meets, and a daughter at the front desk who tells the marks the truth. To bury one secret, Marlo takes a job engineering the biggest con in the state's history - and learns the only way out points the pen at herself. Taut, cold, and merciless. The first Hard Asset novel.