Before you begin The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb (The Boy Who Went Away), know that the main characters are almost entirely unlikable. One is sociopathic con artist; the others, her victims, are more pathetic than sympathetic. You should also know that in spite of this, The Face Thief is compulsively, irresistibly readable.
It opens as a woman--the con artist, beautiful and ruthless--takes a spectacular tumble down a marble staircase. Did she fall or was she pushed? It soon becomes clear that this woman had plenty of enemies and many reasons to watch her back around staircases.
We know her as Margot. Her troubling past is revealed in pieces as she recovers in a hospital, where she is attended to by an unfathomably naive police detective. Margot's more recent history, however, unfolds through two of her victims.
Lawrence Billings, a body-language expert who teaches people how to gain professional advantages through "face reading," takes Margot on as a student and finds his marriage destroyed as a result. The other, John Potash, is elaborately defrauded by her in a scheme that wipes out his family's considerable savings.
It isn't difficult to figure out who is responsible for Margot's fall, so the book's page-turning urgency is a testament to Gottlieb's marvelous sense of suspense. He also has a flair for striking metaphors: the cleft between Margot's breasts is "like the notched sight of a rifle."
These sensuous descriptions, contrasted with Lawrence's analytical observations ("tiny signs of asymmetric contraction around the eyes and mouth alerted him to the ambiguity of her pleasure"), elevate The Face Thief from a fairly banal thriller to a compelling, laudable novel. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice