‘The Grift’ a mystery full of damaged characters

  Marina Marks has been a con artist all her life. As a child, her drug-addicted mother forced her to tell fortunes, reading palms or tarot cards, a task Marina felt kept her from being used as entertainment in a darker way.
  Now an adult, Marina makes her living as a psychic. After business goes bad in Florida and someone puts a dead snake on her steps, she moves her operation to California, slowly building a client base of needy, sometimes desperate people:
  Madeline, the materialistic trophy wife who is terrified that if she doesn’t get pregnant her rich husband will divorce her.
  Cooper, a gay man in love with a gay psychiatrist in denial who Cooper begins to stalk after being rejected.
  Eddie, a sleazy businessman who claims to love his wife but cheats on her frequently and who becomes fixated on Marina after she refuses his advances.
  The lives of these characters and those surrounding them crash together, resulting in a chain of devastating events, made even more complicated after Marina falls in love with the charming Gideon.
  And just when Marina thinks things couldn’t get more confusing, her psychic abilities, which she never believed in, become real. She hears people’s thoughts, sees through their eyes and talks to the dead.
  “The Grift” by Debra Ginsberg is a complicated puzzle, a murder mystery that keeps readers guessing through its cast of damaged characters. Those characters are the real strength in the novel. Some of them you’ll love to hate, others you will hate to love.
  Speaking of love, that is my only real problem with this novel — the love story. I just don't buy it. Marina and Gideon's relationship isn't developed enough for me. Also, Marina seems very disconnected from the people around her. For making a living from being able to read people’s emotions, she herself seems to have none.
  “The Grift” is a great read, if only for the colorful characters, whose paths cross in all sorts of ways, almost like a complicated domino pattern that sets off chain reactions in all directions. And it’s fascinating to read as each character’s actions make another domino topple.