It feels only appropriate, given my subject matter, to celebrate April Fools’ Day with a bit of deception.
After all, if anyone appreciated a well-executed ruse, it was Catherine, the protagonist of my forthcoming novel, Countess of Cons. She was also my husband’s great-grandmother.
Below are five “facts” drawn from her life.
Some will sound improbable.
Some will sound outright ridiculous.
All of them… well, I’ll let you decide.
1. Swindling investors through a fraudulent charity scheme
Catherine presented herself as a respectable force for good, collecting funds for causes that sounded admirable—and proved profitable.
2. Operating under multiple aliases to evade creditors and authorities
Names, identities, backstories—Catherine changed them “more often than her dresses,” as one newspaper reported.
3. Disguising herself in a bizarre costume and appearing at her ex-husband’s home—where a confrontation ended in an accidental shooting meant for his new wife
A plan, a disguise, and a moment that went very wrong.
4. Described by local authorities in Lawrence, Kansas, as a “slick swindler; one of the most expert sneak thieves in the country.”
Not a charge, but a reputation she worked very hard to earn.
5. Facing six indictments in Chicago on charges of fraud and child abuse
By this point, Catherine’s reputation had caught up with her—at least on paper.
Go ahead—pick the ones you think are too outrageous to be true.
I’ll wait.
(Answers at the end of this post. No cheating. I’ll know.)
In the meantime, here is what I’ve been up to lately:
Another milestone reached. Yesterday, I completed the final edit round for Countess of Cons. The next steps are a full read-through to check flow, another read by a couple of beta readers, formatting, and then proofreading. So yes, still on track for a summer release.
There is still writing to be done: the epilogue and author’s note, specifically, but also the marketing pieces such as the back cover copy and the book description for Amazon.
It’s always a little bittersweet to come to the end of a project. This one has lived with me for a long time. I wrote the original nonfiction account in 2017, just for Scott and the family. But I always knew Catherine’s story deserved to be shared with a wider world.
At first glance, she appears to be a selfish, possibly unbalanced woman who did whatever she wanted to get what she needed, consequences and family be damned. But after spending so many years getting to “know” her, I wonder.
Perhaps she was something more complicated—a woman working with a limited set of options and an unusually wide view of what was possible.
We will never truly understand her motivations. We can’t. She’s not here, and there’s no one to ask.
The problem, of course, is that Catherine had a way of making the improbable feel entirely reasonable—and the reasonable just suspicious enough to doubt. She could charm, deflect, reinvent, and move on before anyone quite knew what had happened. Even now, more than a century later, the line between fact and embellishment doesn’t always sit where you expect it to.
And that’s the real trick.
We will never know the full truth of Catherine—what she intended, what she justified, what she chose to forget.
If you’re curious, and a little suspicious, you’ll have to read Countess of Cons and make your own decision.
And now for the reveal—which were true and which were contrived.
April Fool’s.
They were all true.
Every last one. It all happened.
I’ll give you a moment to recover.
This is exactly what happens with Catherine. You go looking for exaggeration, for a little creative flourish, for something you can safely dismiss… and she refuses to cooperate. The truth is already outrageous enough.
So if you guessed carefully, weighed the options, and ruled a few out as “too much,” well… Catherine would be delighted.
And honestly? So am I.
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