Date: March 3, 2025
Author: Kirstin Chen
Genre: crime fiction, caper novel, contemporary fiction, dark comedy
Fun fact: Chinese people believe that a baby is born at the age of one because they count the months spent in the womb.
I was really excited about reading this book. A couple of gals off galavanting and causing quite a ruckus in the purse world. The con: returning knock off purses in the stead of the real purse bought just days prior to such stores as Nieman Marcus. How they did it: the real purse was bought days prior; the receipt was kept and used to return a very convincing knockoff that had just arrived in a shipment straight from China. They then turned around to sell the real on e-Bay for a pretty penny while saving the e-Bay customer a ton of money because they totally bypassed Nieman Marcus and their high purse costs.
These two were making a killing working hand in hand with people that I would consider the equivalent of a Chinese purse cartel. Bad men with lots of money at their disposal doesn’t sound like a good group of people to cross and that is exactly what Ava did.
The book is a really good idea, the execution I felt was lacking. For one thing these super rich, super bad men aren’t a group of people I’d personally want to throw under the bus and her best friend was tossed under that runaway bus as well? I just feel like unless she was going into the witness protection program it would be dangerous to snitch on these people. The risk of injury and/or death falling on family, friends and even one’s own self would be enough to make me think twice.
And does this detective have no boundaries? He totally let Ava, the snitcher, steer the whole conversation. This must have been the longest confession in the history of confessions the way the detective let her wax eloquent about her feelings and how much her kid cried and how this life of crime wasn’t really her bag and on and on. If I was running this show I would have steered the conversation back to the basics of the investigation. Not what color was the sun set as she jet-setted back and forth from San Francisco to China.
Also, in regards to the con-artist friend that got Ava caught up in this lifestyle in the first place? Remember the one she snitched on? Oh, they’re still besties even though the friend had to get plastic surgery to change her face and stay off law enforcement radar while Ava gets off basically Scott-free.
Spoiler alert but when Ava gets off probation, yes that’s all she got, two years paper, if I was the friend-with-the-new-face I would have definitely thought twice about going into another con with Ava, as they were doing at the conclusion of the story. Obviously, Ava likes to sing like a canary. Not good, trustworthy partner-in-crime-techniques.