Liz Bourke Reviews Lady Eve’s Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow

Lady Eve’s Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow (Solaris 978-1-83786-159-0, $16.99, 368pp, tp.) June 2024.

Lady Eve’s Last Con is Rebecca Fraimow’s debut novel, and what an interesting debut it is. Set in a far-future solar system in the glittering, elite high society of New Monte, it stars a small-time grifter who’s decided to run a long con for revenge, only to find herself falling for her mark’s half-sister.

Ruthi Johnson and her younger sister Jules are used to fleecing wealthy tourists on the interstellar cruise lines. Then Jules fell in love with Esteban Mendez-Yuki, heir to his family’s fortune: a love she thought was mutual. Unfortunately, Este­ban’s affection didn’t survive the revelation that Jules wasn’t who she’d first seemed. Now Jules is pregnant, and Ruthi has come to New Monte masquerading as a provincial debutante in order to con Esteban into an engagement (and out of his money) for revenge. Her plans are complicated by the presence of Esteban’s older half-sister, the suave and debonair Sol – in line to inherit exactly none of the Mendez-Yuki fortune, and whose senior role in the family business is far from just for show. Sol is simultaneously very attractive and much harder to fool, but Sol has difficulties of her own. Having taken on a significant debt to help her working-class, non-Mendez-Yuki half-siblings, she’s under a repayment deadline from a criminal syndicate – whose representative Ruthi recognises, and who recognises Ruthi in turn.

Now Ruthi is being pressured by the interstellar mob to help turn the screws on Sol, complicat­ing their mutual attraction even more than the con Ruthi’s running on Sol’s baby brother. Ruthi doesn’t actually want to leave Sol with her life in ruins – she’s not even planning on ruining Este­ban’s life, just taking a bit of his cash and giving him a lesson in heartbreak – but the promptings of her conscience (and her growing, inconvenient attraction) might leave her on the wrong side of the mob. And put a spanner in her revenge. She’s almost got Esteban to the point of signing a con­tract, but Sol is on the point of doing something drastic to get the mob off her back…

That’s when Jules shows up, furious at Ruthi for setting out to take revenge without so much as consulting her. The whole house of cards is on the brink of falling down, and no one will get a happy ending – unless Ruthi can run a last-minute con on Esteban and the mob at the same time.

This is a novel about cons, not about heists. The stakes are played more for happiness and financial security than for life and limb, though once or twice life and limb is at hazard. Happiness and financial security are pretty high stakes, as most of us know, and Fraimow gives us an appealing protagonist in Ruthi (alias Evelyn Ojukwu), with a compelling voice. Her first-person narration is just self-aware enough to make it clear that Ruthi Johnson is absolutely driven by her emotions when it comes to this revenge, and perhaps isn’t thinking entirely clearly about… well, everything. This impression of Ruthi as a feelings-first person makes sense of her connection with Sol, the ways in which she’s willing to be honest with Sol, and her decisions to put herself at risk for Sol. It’s a very entertaining romance arc, especially as Ruthi is trying to romance Esteban – awkward, nerdy, uncomfortable at parties, constantly putting his foot in his mouth, desperately un-self-aware and not in the least observant.

The aesthetics and atmosphere of Lady Eve’s Last Con recall the last hurrah of pre-war excess, à la the iconic history of the Raffles Hotel of Sin­gapore (and perhaps a little of E.W. Hornung’s gentleman thief of the same name): a milieu of glittering wealth, new money and old money all competing for alliances and attention, where the bright young things make their social debut and look for wealthy marriage partners to secure their assets and their business inheritance; and a milieu where relatively conservative mores around sex and marriage make uneasy accommodations with more permissive ones. Fraimow is aiming at a fin de siècle/Gilded Age/Roaring Twenties vibe. She hits the mark hard. (And this science fictional setting has very unevenly distributed access to resources – including, it seems, contraception.)

Ruthi and Jules are partly of New York Jewish extraction. They speak Yiddish with each other, thanks to a mother who passed the language on, and while it seems unlikely that Ruthi makes any effort to keep kosher, you get the feeling that she’d be comfortable doing so, if she weren’t spending so much of her time pretending to be other people. Kosher duck carcases, and the difficulties involved in importing and exporting them in an acceptably kosher fashion over interplanetary distances, form part of a crucial subplot. Ruthi’s heritage and this thread connecting the wider interstellar diaspora to Jewish diasporas gives Lady Eve’s Last Con a sense of depth and connection to a wider history.

While romance (along with swindling the rich and a touch of comedy of manners) forms one emotional axis of Lady Eve’s Last Con, sibling relationships provide a counterpoint. Although Jules doesn’t physically participate in the action of the narrative until the climax, she’s a central part of Ruthi’s life. Ruthi’s protector-provider impulses for her younger sister drive her decision-making, until she’s forced to confront the fact that what Jules actually wants isn’t what Ruthi thinks she ought to want, and to deal with their sisterly relation­ship changing to take account of Jules’s growing up. The sibling relationship, and sibling loyalty, between Esteban and Sol makes an interesting parallel: Sol loves and protects Esteban, but Sol’s trying to leave so that Esteban will have to make a grown-up decision about whether to step up to his responsibilities as heir to the family business and fortune (and not keep letting Sol do the hard parts), or step away entirely to do what he loves.

The conclusion of Lady Eve’s Last Con ties up many threads (including, happily, the romantic tension between Sol and Ruthi) while leaving plenty of possibilities open for future adventures. I want to read those adventures. This is an im­mensely enjoyable romp. I have a feeling I’ll be recommending it quite a bit over the next while. And I’m looking forward with interest to what Fraimow does next.

This review and more like it in the May 2024 issue of Locus.

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