I'm an award-winning journalist, a frequent New York Times contributor (and former business columnist for The Times), and the author of, most recently, Duped: Double Lives, False Identities and the Con Man I Almost Married. Duped was turned into the #1 Spotify-original podcast, Impostors: The Commander, which I hosted and executive produced. I was also a producer/reporter on The NY Times Presents documentary film To Live and Die in Alabama, about the execution of Nathaniel Woods. As of press time, my greatest accomplishments have been summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro (with a broken wrist!), learning to play the cello at 35, and naming Karamel Sutra for Ben and Jerry’s.
I wrote
Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married
You can’t talk about deception and double lives without talking about the charming con artist and serial killer, Tom Ripley. It’s the first of six novels Highsmith wrote with Ripley as the protagonist. Read the book and watch the brilliant Anthony Minghella’s eponymous film starring Matt Damon as Ripley. (There’s also a great French version, Purple Noon, from 1960, with Alain Delon).
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring"…
I’ve been obsessed with Kim Philby for years. Philby was an intelligence officer with MI6 - and also a double agent with the KGB, passing highly classified information to the Russians. How did he do it? Why did he do it? And how did he get away with it for decades? Macintyre's biography explains it all.
Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War.
Philby's two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone, and then discovered they had not known him at all. This is a story of intimate duplicity; of loyalty, trust and treachery, class and conscience; of an ideological battle waged by men with cut-glass accents and…
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in…
Is it possible to detect deception? Can you really tell if someone’s lying just by looking at their body language? If so, what are the cues? When I was writing Duped, I decided to take a class with the authors, who were former CIA agents. I learned a ton.
Imagine how different your life would be if you knew when someone was lying or telling you the truth. Whether hiring a new employee, assessing the veracity of legal testimony, investing in a financial interest, knowing when your boss is being completely up-front, ascertaining whether your child is being totally honest with you, or even dating someone new, having the ability to unmask a lie can have far-reaching and even life-altering consequences. As former CIA agents, Philip Houston, Mike Floyd and Susan Carnicero are among the worlds best at recognizing deceptive behaviour. "Spy The Lie" chronicles the fascinating story of…
I read this novel when it came out in 2014, before I even got my own book deal. I was fascinated by the premise: A marriage counselor who had no idea that her own marriage was a sham, and her husband a psychopath. It hit home for sure. I prefer the book to The Undoing, the recent film on which it was based.
"A great psychological thriller...I couldn't put it down". (Daisy Goodwin). It is a New York Times bestseller. Grace Sachs, a happily married therapist with a young son, thinks she knows everything about women, men and marriage. She is about to publish a book called You Should Have Known, based on her pet theory: women don't value their intuition about what men are really like, leading to serious trouble later on. But how well does Grace know her own husband? She is about to find out, and in the place of what she thought she knew, there will be a violent…
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing…
This is another biography and I liked it so much because it shed light on the inner life of an American hero: Aviator Charles Lindbergh. I talk about him in Duped - Lindbergh had three families in Germany, a wife in the states, and a gaggle of offspring scattered on the two continents. That’s probably why he took up flying.
Even after twenty years, A. Scott Berg's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Charles Lindberg remains "the definitive account" of one of the 20th century's most extraordinary figures.
Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh-renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America's entry into World War II. Lindbergh's is "a dramatic and disturbing American story," says the *Los Angeles Times Book Review, and this biography-the first to be written with unrestricted access to the Lindbergh…
From Abby Ellin's first date with the Commander, she was caught up in a whirlwind. Within six months he'd proposed, and they'd moved in together. But soon, his exotic stories of international espionage began to unravel. Finally, it all became clear: he was lying about who he was. After leaving him and sharing her story, she was floored to find out that her experience was far from unique. People everywhere, many of them otherwise sharp-witted and self-aware, are being deceived by their loved ones every day.
In Duped, Abby Ellin studies the art and science of lying, talks to people who've had their worlds upended by duplicitous partners, and writes with great openness about her own mistakes.
Former police detective Michael McLaren is looking forward to spending Christmas at his grandfather's ancient Hall with his grandfather, uncle, and his lady love, Melanie. But McLaren’s holiday plan gets snowed under when a dead man is discovered outside his grandfather’s house--in circumstances similar to an older murder. And it’s…
The 19th century women's rights movement and the rise of public education intertwine with one woman's story of struggle, perseverance, and love.
Alice Harris is pressed to marry a Civil War veteran twice her age when her family’s inn fails in 1882 in western North Carolina. She remakes herself by…
