My Fair Frauds Summary, Characters and Themes
My Fair Frauds by Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne is a historical con story set in Gilded Age New York, where money buys access and appearances can be manufactured. Coraline O’Malley, a broke stagehand hiding under a false name, wants one thing: enough cash to reclaim her family’s lost Kansas farm.
When she crosses paths with a so-called European duchess who is running a large investment swindle, Coraline forces her way into the operation. What follows is a fast education in etiquette, deception, and power—along with complicated loyalties inside the crew and real danger from the people they are robbing.
Summary
Coraline O’Malley is working backstage for a famous magician, Prospero the Great, using the name Cora Mack to keep her past hidden. One night, the troupe performs at a wealthy woman’s mansion during an extravagant private party full of costumes, rare animals, and rich guests who treat wonder like a toy.
Cora is surrounded by the kind of money that could change her life. Her family lost their Kansas property, Long Creek Farm, and she has been quietly stealing from audiences after shows to save what she can.
But she is already on thin ice. Prospero’s temperamental assistant Dinah suspects Cora and makes it clear she is watching.
After the performance, Cora spots something far bigger than pickpocket money: diamond hairpins set aside with a peacock headpiece. She slips away and uses quick thinking to disguise herself in a gown from Dinah’s room, passing through the mansion like she belongs there.
She finds the pins in the lady of the house’s private bedroom and pockets them, imagining the land she could buy back. But she gets trapped behind locked doors and has to escape into an adjoining room, where she hides and overhears a private conversation.
A bearded man named Ward McAllister speaks with a guest dressed as foreign royalty. When the “duchess” drops her accent, he calls her Alice, and they discuss a plan aimed at five wealthy families, including a difficult recluse named Peyton.
The talk is not about jewelry or parties—it’s about getting extremely rich.
Cora tries to leave, but she runs into Alice. Alice immediately figures out what happened and forces Cora to return the pins.
To keep the party from turning into a scandal that would harm her larger scheme, Alice insists the pins are fake and pays Cora a small amount for her silence, sending her away. Cora is furious.
She has lost the best chance she has ever seen, and she can’t afford to walk away. She uses the money she was given to follow Alice’s carriage through the city and finds where she lives.
At dawn, Cora confronts Alice and demands a deal. She threatens to expose Alice as a fraud unless Alice takes her on and teaches her.
Cora offers herself as an asset: she is hungry, bold, and willing to risk everything. She gives Alice a deadline—if Alice does not answer before Cora’s troupe leaves that evening, Cora will go straight to the mansion and tell the truth.
After Cora leaves, Ward argues that keeping her close could help, especially if they need someone new to draw out the elusive Peyton. Alice is not just greedy; she is driven by a long-term plan with personal motives, and she decides Cora may be useful.
Alice arrives at the boardinghouse before the deadline and lays down strict rules. Cora will obey instantly, cut ties with her old life, and follow instructions without hesitation.
Alice explains the basic con: she poses as a Württemberg grand duchess raising money for a cause, offering early access to an investment opportunity tied to emerald mines. Five families are the targets, and the entire operation must finish by May 1.
Cora’s role will be to become Alice’s “cousin,” an emerald heiress named Cora Ritter—another aristocratic figure who can win sympathy, attention, and trust. The hardest target will be the Peytons, and the plan depends on making Peyton’s son fall in love.
Cora agrees, even though it means abandoning her job, her savings, and the one steady thing she had. Alice takes her to a new apartment where other members of the crew live: Béatrice and Dagmar.
There is also the ever-present Ward, who has his own social power and connections. Training begins immediately.
Alice is relentless, correcting every mistake in posture, speech, and manners. Cora is taught table settings, conversation pacing, how to accept compliments, how to enter a room, and how to use restraint as a performance.
Béatrice tutors her in French; Dagmar pushes her German with little patience. Cora learns to play whist and learns quickly that Dagmar wins by staying calm while others show emotion.
Alice warns Cora not to appear too clever in public. Wealthy society likes a certain kind of innocence, especially from young women.
As weeks pass, Cora changes. She learns to move in expensive clothing, to keep her face controlled, and to let other people talk themselves into belief.
Alice buys her a wardrobe as an investment, planning to resell gowns later to fund the next steps. Despite Alice’s hard edge, small signs of attachment leak through—shared drinks on Thanksgiving, a rare laugh when Cora breaks into an Irish jig during dance practice, a holiday exchange of gifts that catches them all off guard.
Cora gives Alice a blank leather notebook for planning, and Alice reacts more strongly than she intends. Still, Alice keeps emotional distance.
This is a job, she insists, and afterward they will separate.
In January, Alice reviews their targets carefully. The Ames family is eager for royal connections and wants their daughter Arabella positioned for a match.
The Vandemeers are old money and must be handled with pride and rivalry. The Witts are drawn to novelty and spectacle.
The Ogdens require getting the wife on side while managing the husband’s appetites. The Peytons are the key, especially the father, who is hard to reach, and the son, Harold “Harry” Peyton Jr., who can be used as leverage.
With invitations secured, Alice declares the lessons finished. Now Cora must perform.
At a major ball at Delmonico’s, Alice enters as the duchess, dazzling the room with Ward at her side. Cora is introduced as Miss Cora Ritter.
She plays the part of an exile and a grieving woman with a distant homeland, giving society women what they want: mystery, tragedy, and status. But the younger women treat her as an outsider.
Rumors spread, especially from Mimi Vandemeer and Bonnie Witt, claiming Cora is connected to the occult through emeralds. Suitors keep their distance.
Then Harry Peyton arrives in a strange outfit that makes him stand out, and Cora realizes she has to act fast. She ends up trapped in conversation with Beau Witt, who is fascinated by the rumor.
To break free and get Harry’s attention, Cora fakes a fainting spell near the punch, steals Beau’s pencil in the process, and collapses into Harry’s arms. Harry responds like a medical student, checking her pulse and explaining what happened in clinical terms.
It works. He is sincere, curious, and sheltered, and Cora sees how hungry he is for a life beyond a narrow slice of Manhattan.
She offers that possibility and wins him over enough to secure a public dance, drawing attention and stirring jealousy from Arabella.
Soon after, Alice brings Cora to church to reinforce their image, but the visit hits Alice unexpectedly hard. Something in the setting triggers old memories, and she flees in tears.
Outside, a reporter named Cal Archer has been watching their building, questioning the duchess story and the emerald-mine claims. Cora accidentally reveals she has read his writing, alarming Alice, who treats him as a serious threat.
Béatrice returns with a major new lure: a stunning emerald necklace intended to serve as proof of wealth and draw investors in. Alice announces they are moving into the final phase.
Cora later faces Cal alone and is forced to defend the story. Thinking quickly, she invents a convincing explanation involving hidden treaties and concealed resources, implying Württemberg’s riches are protected and politically complicated.
Cal seems satisfied for the moment, leaving Cora excited that she managed to hold the line.
But the strain catches up to her. After the ball, Cora collapses emotionally, until Dagmar drags her out of the apartment and takes her downtown to drink among working women.
It is the first time Cora feels like someone is speaking to her plainly. Dagmar tells her Alice is not her friend, and that Cora is being used as the public face of the scheme, especially for the plan involving marriage to Harry.
While drunk, Cora runs into Cal again and vents under the protection of “off the record.” She lies in a way that lets her tell the truth: she says she is being pushed toward a wedding, that she feels like a pawn, and that she is afraid of repeating the mistakes of people who trusted the wrong powers. The conversation turns flirtatious, and the night ends in chaos and regret.
The next morning, Cal shows up in the apartment and confronts Alice directly, accusing her of forcing Cora into a real marriage. In the argument, Cora realizes Cal calls Alice by her real name.
The truth spills out: Cal Archer is Alice’s brother, and he has been part of the plan from the beginning, using his newspaper to print stories that support the fake duchess and the mine venture. The mines are fiction.
Some pieces are real—at least one prince exists, and there is at least one genuine emerald—but the opportunity they are selling is a constructed lie.
Cal proposes accelerating the schedule so Cora will not have to marry Harry at all. Alice resists but admits their investors are nearly ready and only Peyton Sr. remains uncommitted.
As planning tightens, Alice gives Cora a new test: steal an emerald necklace from Mimi Vandemeer and replace it with a fake, so they can present “proof” to a key investor.
At the opera during Carmen, Cora attends in the Ameses’ box with Harry and a miserable Arabella. Mimi shows off the necklace across the theater with Alice sitting close enough to watch everything.
Cora struggles to get access, with Harry keeping her near and Mimi moving constantly. Ward warns it is too public to attempt the switch in the box.
Cora signals a new idea: force Mimi into privacy. Alice “accidentally” spills red wine onto Mimi’s dress, sending her to the water closet.
Cora races ahead, creates a staged collision at the door, and swaps the necklace clasp under cover of fabric and movement. The real emerald disappears into a hidden compartment while a glass counterfeit takes its place.
Mimi leaves none the wiser.
The real emerald is presented for appraisal at the Ogdens’ home, and Brett Ogden becomes dangerously fixated, especially on Alice. When his attention shifts toward Cora, Alice humiliates Cora with a forced folk performance to redirect him.
Later, Ogden corners Alice in a carriage and turns violent, trying to force himself on her. Alice nearly shoots him with a concealed gun, but Ward intervenes with a staged disruption so Cora can join them.
Ogden leaves, promising another chance, and Alice is shaken in a way she refuses to discuss.
Cora goes to find Cal and finally learns the depth of Alice’s motive. Their family once had status, but Ames, Vandemeer, Witt, and Ogden manipulated Alice’s father into investing everything into railroad bonds linked to Peyton’s business.
The father killed himself, and Alice found him. A baby died, their mother deteriorated, and Alice spent years surviving with no safety net.
The con is not only about money; it is revenge built with patience and precision. Cal admits he pushed to speed up the end partly because he wants to protect Cora from the marriage, and because he wants her for himself.
Their moment is interrupted when Harry appears and announces that his father is ready to invest heavily, intending to lead the group. The plan is now moving faster than anyone can safely control.
As the final setup unfolds, Alice insists the crew will separate after the job. Ward brags about leaving for Paris once the money is secured.
At a themed banquet hosted by Mrs. Witt, the wealthy pretend to be poor for entertainment, and Cora is repulsed by the performance of misery. Alice uses the occasion to distribute coveted embassy invitations, drawing their targets closer.
Cora privately asks Arabella to make a promise: on Tuesday, when Cora asks something, Arabella must agree without questions. Arabella, terrified of her future and desperate for direction, agrees.
The Tuesday meeting is staged as an embassy event for Württemberg. The crew has transformed the space into a convincing financial environment.
A fake ambassador appears, Dagmar acts as staff, Béatrice runs a telegraph machine, and a fake ticker creates the illusion of a market frenzy. The investors arrive in order—Vandemeer, Witt, Ogden, the Peytons, and the Ameses, with Arabella present too.
Ward pushes for cash deposits, and the ticker shows emerald prices rising, sending the room into competitive panic. Peyton Sr. dominates the meeting, throwing down huge sums and forcing the others to follow.
When cash runs short, promissory notes are signed and carried away by newsboys working for Cal, supposedly headed to banks.
After the commitments are secured, Alice announces a celebratory lunch and herds the group out. Ogden lingers behind and attacks Alice again, shutting the door and trying to control her.
During the struggle, the ticker device falls and reveals blank tape, exposing the trick. Ogden realizes the crew has escaped and turns even more violent, stealing Alice’s gun and ordering her to undress.
Outside, Cora realizes Alice never made it out and rushes back with Cal. Cal pretends to be a victim who tracked Cora to the “frauds,” tricking Ogden into lowering his guard.
Cora crawls close, flirts, and pickpockets the gun back, then holds Ogden at gunpoint. Cal binds and gags him, and they escape.
The crew regroups at Mrs. Astor’s home, revealing another shock: Alice is Astor’s goddaughter, and Astor has been quietly involved, steering events from behind the scenes. The stolen money is counted—an astonishing sum.
Béatrice reports that the emerald itself is missing, and Alice realizes Cora took it for her own reason: securing the future she never stopped wanting. Mrs. Astor forces Ward out of the deal, leaving him only a small payment, and the crew prepares to vanish.
In the aftermath, the group chooses a different life than the one society expects. Alice and Béatrice decide to build a school for girls.
Cora and Cal go to Kansas to buy back Long Creek Farm. Later, the school operates there, with Alice as headmistress and Cora teaching, while Béatrice teaches and Cal writes a novel inspired by what they pulled off.
Maeve joins them, and Dagmar stays in New York, performing and helping people who need it. Behind them, the lives of the families they targeted begin to unravel, while the former con artists build a quieter world where women and girls can learn skills, independence, and a kind of freedom none of them were born with.
Characters
Coraline O’Malley (Cora Mack / “Miss Cora Ritter”)
Coraline begins My Fair Frauds as a working-class survivor who has already learned to adapt quickly, switching names and roles as easily as she changes costumes, because poverty has made reinvention feel like a necessary skill rather than a moral choice. Her longing to reclaim Long Creek Farm is the emotional engine behind almost every decision she makes, and it gives her theft a purpose that feels, to her, closer to justice than greed.
What makes Cora compelling is the tension between her hunger for security and her desire to be seen as more than a tool: she enters Alice’s orbit to gain access to wealth, but she gradually wants agency inside the scheme, not just a paycheck or a disguise. Her training reshapes her body and voice, yet it doesn’t erase the sharpness underneath; she learns to perform softness, ignorance, and ornamental charm while staying alert, tactical, and ambitious.
Over time, she becomes the con’s most flexible instrument—able to flirt, misdirect, steal, and improvise under pressure—yet that same flexibility pushes her toward an identity crisis, because she starts to enjoy the power of being “Miss Ritter” even as she resents the cage that role creates. By the end, her choice to take the emerald for her own plan signals that she has stopped accepting other people’s rules entirely; she isn’t merely escaping hardship anymore, she is actively rewriting the terms of her future and claiming a stake in what the con becomes after revenge is satisfied.
Alice (the “Württemberg grand duchess”)
Alice is the architect of the deception and the emotional center of the story’s harder truths, because her elegance is built on rage that has been carefully disciplined into strategy. She performs royalty with such conviction because she isn’t just playing a part—she is correcting a world that once humiliated her family, and she treats the con as a form of repayment with interest.
Her leadership is ruthless, not because she enjoys cruelty for its own sake, but because she believes hesitation is how people like her lose; she demands obedience, imposes rules, and withholds affection as if affection is a liability that can be exploited. At the same time, flashes of vulnerability break through in moments she cannot fully control, especially when memory ambushes her, revealing that her polished exterior is a defense mechanism as much as a weapon.
Alice’s relationship with Cora is therefore charged and unstable: she needs Cora’s beauty and adaptability, but she also fears what closeness might do to her focus, so she oscillates between harsh mentorship and rare tenderness. The con is framed as a deadline-driven mission, yet the deeper deadline is psychological—Alice must finish her revenge before she is forced to imagine a life that isn’t fueled by it.
Her eventual decision to build a school and to remain with Béatrice and Cora shows that she finally allows herself something she never planned for: continuity, repair, and a future shaped by creation rather than destruction.
Calvin “Cal” Archer
Cal is both a pressure valve and a destabilizing force within the operation, because he is emotionally involved in a way Alice refuses to be. As a reporter, he weaponizes credibility for the con, using public narrative to reinforce private deception, and this makes him uniquely dangerous: he isn’t stealing jewels in drawing rooms, he is altering what an entire city believes.
Yet Cal’s conscience is more porous than Alice’s, and his growing attachment to Cora makes him push for accelerating the plan not purely for profit or revenge, but to spare her from being sacrificed to a “real” marriage. His flirtation with Cora isn’t just romantic; it’s also symbolic—he is drawn to the real person behind the performance, and he repeatedly tries to pull her toward honesty even while participating in the lie.
That contradiction is what gives him depth: he benefits from the scheme, helps sustain it, and still wants to rescue someone from its consequences. When he confronts Alice, calling her by her real name and challenging her methods, he becomes the one person who can pierce her control without being immediately discarded, because he shares her history and therefore cannot be dismissed as an outsider.
By the end, his move to Kansas and his decision to write a novel suggest he transitions from manufacturing propaganda for profit to telling a story for meaning, turning the skills of manipulation into a form of testimony.
Ward McAllister
Ward functions as the con’s social hinge and its most pragmatic opportunist, presenting himself as a mentor while treating people as pieces on a board. He understands the machinery of elite New York—the invitations, the rules, the reputations—and he uses that expertise to open doors the women could not easily force on their own, which makes him indispensable even when he is morally slippery.
Ward’s worldview is transactional: he admires Alice because she is talented and educated, but his admiration doesn’t prevent him from trying to steer the scheme toward his preferred risks, his preferred targets, and ultimately his preferred profit. He also represents a particular kind of predation that hides behind manners; he can apologize smoothly, present gifts theatrically, and still pressure the crew hard when money is at stake.
His dream of leaving for Paris after the score reveals how little loyalty he feels—he is invested in the con, not in the people. That is why his downfall is fitting: the very society he navigates so expertly is also capable of discarding him, and Mrs. Astor’s intervention shows that Ward’s influence was never absolute.
He ends as a reminder that proximity to power is not the same as possessing it.
Béatrice
Béatrice is the quiet stabilizer of the group, a person whose competence and warmth create a counterbalance to Alice’s severity and Dagmar’s bluntness. She contributes practical value—language instruction, household coordination, steady presence—but her deeper role is emotional, because she represents the possibility that the crew could be more than criminals sharing a project.
Béatrice’s connection with Alice grows with a tenderness that Alice did not plan for, and that growth subtly changes the moral texture of the story: revenge is no longer the only organizing principle once care becomes real. Unlike Cora, who fights for agency through bold improvisation, Béatrice asserts herself through consistency and calm, and that steadiness becomes crucial when the con’s tension rises.
She also embodies the idea that reinvention does not have to be a lie; her skills, teaching, and later work at the school show reinvention as building rather than disguising. In the ending, Béatrice’s role as an educator completes her arc, turning her nurturing instincts into a lasting structure that outlives the con.
Dagmar
Dagmar is the crew’s blunt instrument and its most honest voice, someone who refuses the sentimental narratives the others sometimes cling to. She can cook, correct languages, and play the part required of her, but she never pretends that any of this is about friendship or fairness; she repeatedly forces Cora to confront the reality that Alice uses people, because Dagmar would rather be harsh than be false.
Her trip with Cora to the Bowery reveals an important layer: Dagmar has a life beyond the operation, and that life is rooted in working-class spaces where identity is less performative and more direct. She doesn’t romanticize suffering, but she understands it, and she offers Cora a kind of rough care that is more bracing than comforting.
Dagmar also embodies survival without illusion—she flirts, negotiates, and navigates danger with a streetwise clarity that matches Cora’s instincts more than Alice’s refinement. In the epilogue, her choice to remain in New York acting and helping the poor suggests she is the character most anchored to the city’s realities, someone who does not need a pastoral ending to feel free.
Prospero
Prospero exists at the edge of the con narrative, yet he matters because he represents the first system Cora tries to climb: the world of performance as labor. His troupe gives Cora proximity to wealth and spectacle, but it also traps her in low pay and constant vulnerability, which is exactly what drives her toward bigger risks.
Prospero’s shows are a kind of mirror for the later fraud—both rely on illusion, timing, misdirection, and audience hunger to believe. The difference is that Prospero sells illusion openly as entertainment, while Alice sells illusion as reality, and Cora’s movement from stage magic to social con artistry shows her shifting from performing for applause to performing for survival.
Prospero’s relative distance from Cora’s inner world also emphasizes how disposable workers are in that environment; Cora knows one accusation could erase her livelihood, and that fear becomes the lever Dinah and Maeve hold over her early on.
Maeve
Maeve is the first authority figure Cora encounters in the story’s present timeline, and she embodies the complicated morality of someone who is both protector and enforcer. As lead stagehand, Maeve understands how precarious their positions are, so her loyalty is always filtered through risk management: she defends Cora to Dinah, yet she also makes it clear that Cora’s stealing could bring disaster down on all of them.
Maeve’s choices show how working-class solidarity can fracture under scarcity—she cares, but she also polices, because one person’s mistake can cost everyone. The fact that Maeve later joins the Archer School as matron recontextualizes her character as someone who ultimately values stability and community; she is not defined by betrayal or protection alone, but by a practical desire to keep people safe, even if her methods are imperfect.
Dinah
Dinah is vanity sharpened into cruelty, a performer who knows her value and uses that knowledge to dominate those beneath her. Her insults toward Cora are not just personal nastiness; they are territorial, an attempt to remind a lowly stagehand that glamour belongs to a different class of woman.
Dinah’s threat to expose Cora’s pickpocketing also reveals how performance spaces reproduce the same hierarchy as elite drawing rooms: people with visibility can leverage that visibility to punish people without it. She is also a warning figure for Cora, showing what happens when identity becomes fused to the role—Dinah’s status depends on being admired, so she lashes out whenever she feels control slipping.
Even though she doesn’t remain central as the plot shifts, her presence at the beginning is important because she pushes Cora toward the larger con; Dinah makes it clear that small theft will never be safe or enough.
Mrs. Iris Witt
Mrs. Witt is an emblem of wealth that treats extravagance as a personality trait, and her “Night of Illusions” establishes the environment the con will later exploit: a social class that confuses spectacle with substance. She is hungry for novelty, eager to be impressed, and willing to spend lavishly to purchase wonder, which makes her an ideal mark not because she is stupid, but because she is accustomed to getting what she wants through money.
Her household also illustrates how power is distributed—servants move silently through her world, carrying secrets, jewelry, and access, and it’s through watching those hidden pathways that Cora and Alice learn how to navigate the rich. Mrs. Witt’s later participation in themed events like the “Poverty Ball” shows how insulated she is from real hardship; she can cosplay deprivation for entertainment precisely because deprivation is not a threat to her.
Brett Ogden
Brett Ogden is the story’s most explicit portrait of entitlement turning predatory, a man whose desire for wealth and control spills over into sexual violence when he believes he has privacy and leverage. He is captivated by Alice’s performance because it offers him both profit and the thrill of possessing something rare, but that fascination quickly reveals itself as a need to dominate rather than to admire.
His oscillation—flirting with Alice, then turning his attention to Cora, then snapping back when Alice humiliates Cora—shows how he treats women as interchangeable objects in his fantasy of power. Ogden’s attack on Alice at the embassy is also narratively significant because it threatens to collapse the con through brute force rather than clever detection; he is not the refined adversary who catches them with logic, he is the violent adversary who tries to crush them when he senses he is losing.
In the end, he is humiliated and restrained, but not redeemed, serving as a reminder that the con artists are not the only predators in the story—society’s “respectable” men can be worse.
Pearl Ames
Pearl is ambition expressed through motherhood, a woman who treats her daughter as a social project and marriage as a strategic transaction. Her obsession with securing a royal connection isn’t purely vanity; it’s a grasp at permanence in a world where status feels competitive and fragile.
Pearl’s anxiety makes her manipulable, because she will interpret any small sign of favor from the “duchess” as proof she is winning, and she will ignore warning signs if acknowledging them risks losing her imagined future. At the same time, Pearl is not portrayed as purely foolish; she is operating according to the logic her society taught her, where a woman’s power is often indirect and routed through family alliances.
Her presence sharpens the book’s critique of how women can be both victims and enforcers of the same system.
Arabella Ames
Arabella is the human cost of Pearl’s ambition, a young woman being steered toward a life that is supposed to look like triumph but feels to her like emptiness. She is not simply a rival to Cora; she is another kind of pawn, someone whose privilege does not protect her from being used, only changes the shape of the cage.
Arabella’s unease around the “royal” fantasy shows she senses, even if she cannot name it, that the story being sold to her is hollow. Her interactions with Cora are especially revealing because Cora, despite deceiving her, recognizes the familiar feeling of being pushed into someone else’s plan.
When Arabella agrees to help Cora later without questions, it signals a bond formed through shared fear of the future, and it suggests Arabella is quietly searching for an exit from the script written for her.
Harold “Harry” Peyton Jr.
Harry is an unusually gentle mark, which makes him both useful and dangerous to the con: useful because he is sincere and susceptible to romantic hope, and dangerous because his sincerity invites guilt and emotional complication. His medical-minded vocabulary and earnest concern give him an identity separate from his father’s brutal business presence, and his limited experience of the city hints at a life constrained by wealth in a different way than Cora’s poverty.
Harry’s attraction to Cora is rooted in what she represents to him—movement, novelty, possibility—and Cora expertly feeds that longing, yet she also begins to feel trapped by it as the plan demands she steer him toward commitment. He becomes the clearest illustration of how the con’s success relies on manipulating real human emotion, not just greed.
When Harry announces his father is ready to invest, his joy is genuine, and that genuineness makes the oncoming collapse feel less like a clever victory and more like a moral cliff.
Harold Peyton Sr.
Peyton Sr. is the embodiment of coercive power, a man who uses intimidation as a default language and expects compliance from everyone, including his son. He represents the industrial-scale greed that dwarfs even the con artists’ ambitions, because he doesn’t just want profit—he wants dominance, to be the primary investor and the controlling force.
His presence also explains why the crew’s plan requires careful orchestration; they aren’t only stealing from frivolous socialites, they are provoking a man who is accustomed to crushing obstacles. Peyton Sr. connects the con to Alice’s original wound, since the ruined railroad bonds tied to his world are part of the mechanism that destroyed her family.
He is therefore not merely a late-stage mark; he is a symbol of the system Alice is attacking.
Mimi Vandemeer
Mimi is social cruelty packaged as youthful glamour, someone who weaponizes rumor to maintain hierarchy among young women competing for attention. Her decision to spread the occult story about Cora shows how the wealthy police belonging not only through invitations and money, but through narrative control—deciding who is desirable, who is absurd, who is safe to approach.
Mimi’s emerald necklace becomes both a literal target and a metaphor for her status, and Cora’s successful swap at the opera is a reversal of power: the girl who tried to isolate Cora becomes the one unknowingly stripped of her most visible symbol. Mimi’s role underscores that the con does not only prey on old men with fortunes; it also exploits the petty viciousness and vanity that circulate among the privileged.
Bonnie Witt
Bonnie functions as Mimi’s ally and amplifier, showing how rumors become social currency when multiple people repeat them to gain belonging. Her participation in ostracizing Cora highlights the defensive nature of elite youth culture: when an outsider appears, the quickest way to protect one’s rank is to cast the outsider as strange, dangerous, or laughable.
Bonnie also reflects how wealth can insulate cruelty from consequence—she can be malicious without fearing retaliation, because she assumes the world will side with her by default. Even if she is less individually defined than Mimi, her presence deepens the sense that Cora is fighting not just individual enemies, but an entire ecosystem designed to exclude her.
Beau Witt
Beau is an example of how fascination can be another form of objectification, because his obsession with the occult rumor reduces Cora to a curiosity rather than a person. He corners her, probes her, and tries to extract entertainment, illustrating how rich men can treat women as experiences to consume.
Beau’s role also gives Cora a stage for her tactical brilliance: her swoon, her theft of his pencil, and her engineered fall into Harry’s arms show how she turns harassment into opportunity. He isn’t the most dangerous male figure, but he is representative of the casual entitlement that saturates the world Cora is trying to infiltrate.
Mrs. Caroline Astor
Mrs. Astor operates like a hidden governor of the social world, a figure whose approval or disapproval can elevate or erase reputations. Her importance isn’t in frequent appearances but in the gravitational force she exerts: even Alice, who is fearless with most people, treats Astor as a risk that could collapse everything if mishandled.
The revelation that Alice is her goddaughter reframes the story’s social dynamics, implying that Alice’s access to the elite world is not purely the product of cunning but also connected to unseen networks and old obligations. Astor’s final intervention, where she controls Ward’s share and dictates terms, demonstrates her true power: she doesn’t need to chase the con or expose it publicly to win, because she can simply rearrange outcomes behind closed doors.
Konrad
Konrad is a functional specialist in the crew, important less for personal drama and more for what he represents: the con’s dependence on credible role-play. His ability to embody official authority as the “ambassador” shows how easily institutions can be impersonated when the audience is eager to believe.
He is part of the machinery that transforms a rented space and a few props into something that feels like state power. In a story obsessed with performance, Konrad’s role underlines that the most convincing costumes are often the ones associated with bureaucracy and legitimacy.
Themes
Performance as Power and Survival
Coraline’s earliest advantage is not money or family name, but her ability to read a room and adjust her body, voice, and confidence to match what people want to believe. Working as a stagehand teaches her that an audience’s perception can be guided with timing, props, and controlled attention, and the con simply transfers those mechanics from a theater to drawing rooms and ballrooms.
Once she becomes “Miss Ritter,” she learns that high society also runs on rehearsed gestures: when to speak, how long to hold eye contact, how to accept admiration without appearing hungry for it, and how to look both available and untouchable. This performance is not presented as a shallow trick; it is labor, discipline, and constant risk management.
The training scenes show that class is not only inherited but practiced, drilled into the muscles until it looks natural. That is why the fraud works: the rich are trained in a different way, trained to trust surfaces that match their own rules.
The story keeps returning to the idea that truth is often less persuasive than a believable routine delivered with calm authority. Yet performance is also a trap.
Coraline’s success depends on becoming convincing enough that her own feelings get folded into the role: her attraction to attention, her yearning to be seen, and her fear of being discarded all become tools others can use. In My Fair Frauds, the ability to perform creates access, safety, and leverage, but it also raises the question of where the performance ends and the person begins—especially when the role offers everything Coraline has ever been denied.
Class as a System of Gates and Scripts
Wealth in the story is not merely an amount of money; it is a protected world with rituals that decide who belongs. The “Night of Illusions” makes this plain immediately: opulence is staged as entertainment, servants move like invisible machinery, and guests treat luxury as proof of virtue.
Coraline’s first impulse is practical—steal to reclaim the farm—but her experience inside these mansions shows a broader truth: the rich are insulated not just by locks and guards, but by etiquette that functions like a private language. When Coraline borrows a gown and walks as if she belongs, she temporarily passes through those gates because the household is trained to obey the appearance of status.
Later, the lessons about forks, conversation, and dancing reveal how class is maintained through tiny tests that outsiders are expected to fail. Even the debutantes enforce hierarchy by policing rumors, weaponizing “taste” and moral panic to isolate a rival.
The con takes advantage of this system, but it also exposes it. The targets want proximity to royalty because it validates their place at the top; their greed is social as much as financial.
They do not merely want profit, they want confirmation that they are chosen, connected, superior. The scheme succeeds because it feeds that hunger with carefully rationed access: invitations, private meetings, whispers of exclusivity.
At the same time, the book refuses to romanticize the thieves as pure heroes. Coraline’s desperation comes from dispossession, but once she learns the rules, she can use them against others with frightening efficiency.
My Fair Frauds treats class as a set of scripts that can be learned, copied, and exploited, while still showing how crushing it is to live outside the gates in the first place.
Identity, Reinvention, and the Cost of Passing
Coraline changes her name, her clothes, her posture, and her speech, but the most difficult transformation is internal: learning to treat her own history as a liability that must be hidden. Reinvention offers her a path toward agency, yet it requires a steady denial of self.
When Alice warns her not to appear too intelligent, the point is not simply to avoid suspicion; it is to fit a gendered and classed expectation of what a young “lady” should be. Coraline is asked to shrink her mind in public, to perform innocence and softness because those traits make men protective and women less threatened.
Passing becomes a form of violence done quietly to the self: each successful evening is also an evening where the real Coraline must be buried. That burial produces anger and grief that leak out in risky moments, like her night in the Bowery when she tries to speak honestly but can only do it through another lie.
The story also shows that reinvention is not evenly available. The wealthy can reinvent themselves as patrons, collectors, or philanthropists without losing safety; the poor reinvent themselves to survive and can be punished for the smallest slip.
Coraline’s fear of exposure is not only fear of embarrassment. Exposure would mean losing income, protection, and the possibility of reclaiming her family’s land.
The tension between freedom and erasure runs through her relationships as well. She is drawn to the power of becoming someone new, yet she longs for someone to recognize her without the costume.
In My Fair Frauds, identity is treated as both a tool and a wound: transforming yourself can open doors, but it also demands a constant payment in secrecy, isolation, and self-surveillance.
Truth, Belief, and How Narratives Become Reality
The con succeeds because belief is social and contagious. A fake duchess becomes real in the eyes of Manhattan because enough people repeat the story, newspapers echo it, servants whisper it, and invitations validate it.
Cal’s role in publishing stories shows how printed authority can manufacture legitimacy, especially when it aligns with what the powerful already want to hear. The reporter’s skepticism also shows that truth is not merely evidence; it is access.
He lacks certain records, but he also lacks the ability to penetrate elite spaces without cooperation, which makes him vulnerable to confident explanations delivered with poise. Coraline’s improvised history lesson to him demonstrates a key point: a detailed narrative often feels more truthful than a simple one, even if it is invented.
The wealthy families, meanwhile, treat disbelief as rudeness because doubt threatens their fantasy of special access. Once they commit socially—showing up, being seen, boasting to rivals—it becomes harder to retreat, and belief hardens into action.
The book highlights how institutions, from high-society networks to newspapers, can turn fiction into a temporary reality with real consequences: money changes hands, reputations shift, marriages are contemplated, and danger escalates. Yet on a personal level, truth is also emotional.
Coraline’s lies sometimes express what she cannot say directly, and Alice’s constructed identity protects wounds she cannot face openly. The final community they build suggests a different relationship with narrative: instead of using stories to trap others, they use education to give girls the ability to interpret stories, question them, and write their own.
In My Fair Frauds, truth is not treated as a simple moral line; it is shown as something shaped by power, repetition, and desire, and the story asks what it means to live in a world where the most believable story often wins.
