Spotlight & Giveaway: The Confidence Games by Tess Amy

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Tess Amy to HJ!

Hi Tess and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Confidence Games!

 
Hi, Thanks for stopping by!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

The Confidence Games is a fast-paced feminist caper, following the exploits of life-long best friends, and Europe’s most infamous swindlers – Emma and Nellie – who are blackmailed into stealing a priceless bracelet from a high-profile London exhibition. Cue mind games, pickpocketing, found family and adventure!
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“Sometimes it takes the scary things to show us how brave we are”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

-I’m a bit scared to admit this but I basically had to learn how to be a cyber hacker before I wrote this book! I have a few friends (who’d rather not be named) who are top class hackers, so I asked them for a crash course. I also may or may not have learned how to pickpocket.
 

Tell us about your main characters: 

If we’re talking about Emma and Dax…

Emma is a heartbroken swindler who makes her money conning bad men. Dax is the wannabe cyber hacker she hires to clean up her digital footprint. Dax also happens to be HOT, kind, generous, uber-cool and…(spoiler!!)…gay.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

The below scene is from the first chapter in the book, where we see Emma at her worst (her soon-to-be-hubby cheats on her, breaks off the engagement, then sues her for everything she’s worth). I found this scene very emotional to write as it shows how close Emma comes to giving up on herself, and thus losing out all the things she’s destined to be, and experience. I think we’ve all been there at some point…

“In a blaze of moving light, I saw the rest of my life unfold as if I’d already lived it. I saw dazzling sunsets in foreign skies, bright nights in strange cities. I saw myself in a thousand different places, none of which I’d been in before: old forests and ancient cobblestone streets, town squares and rolling hills. Morning rain, the sun in my eyes. Stars, a trillion miles away. I saw skyscrapers and church spires, the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Blue Mosque—all the wonders I’d never got around to seeing in my short, chaotic, empty life. I can’t say it was a premonition. Maybe it was a waking dream. But if I had nothing left to live for because I had nothing left to lose, then why did I feel so afraid to lose this?”

Readers should read this book….

Because it’ll be fun! There’s a lot of sad, horrible stuff happening in the world right now so I hope to bring a little joy to people in whatever way I can.

But also, I wanted this story to be about the power of friendship and family. I also wanted to explore the nature of karma, and how much of the way we see right and wrong is coloured by our past experiences. By claiming to only con “bad men” Nellie and Emma believe they live by a strong moral code. But do they? Are the “bad” men they deceive always bad? Playing around with this concept has actually taught me a lot about my own prejudices, and I love it when I hear how that’s been the case with my readers too.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently writing/editing my July 2025 release. It will be another standalone, a murder mystery slash caper set in a super fun women’s’ prison in California (a super fun prison, you heard that right!).
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A print copy of THE CONFIDENCE GAMES by Tess Amy

 
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To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you were allowed to be an A-grade swindler for a day without any consequences, what would you do and why?

Excerpt from The Confidence Games:

It was the spring after Joel, close to Easter, and Nellie and I had just started planning out the details of our new lives as confidence tricksters. Having lost the court case with Joel (surprise, surprise), I was broke and basically unemployable. This new “career path” was, therefore, really and truly all I had left. But while Nellie had been a master pickpocket and grade A liar since the age of eight, I’d only ever watched her from the sidelines. A problem that had to be remedied. “If we’re going to do this for a living,” Nellie said, “it can’t just be me dipping my fingers into pockets. You’re going to have to learn too.” And who better to teach me the tricks of the trade than the woman who’d taught Nellie, her great-aunt. We called her Gran.
While Gran was Gran to both of us, she wasn’t really a gran to either of us. To Nellie she was her real gran’s half sister, a brazen Scot who lived alone in a tiny cottage in Edinburgh and survived off the cash she made selling trinkets she’d swindled off people she despised. She swore like a sailor, smoked six packs of cigarettes a day, and had been arrested more times than anyone could recall. To me she was first an obscure legend, someone Nellie spoke about as if she were Robin Hood or a fairy godmother. After that spring in Edinburgh, though, Gran morphed into someone real, a person the new me could aspire to be.
Nellie and I stayed for three months in her cottage (the longest period of company she’d ever had), playing cards and dipper’s chess, board games and mind games, doing our best to lighten each other’s pockets and tell each other impossible fibs. I’m not sure I was any better at lying or stealing by the end of it, but when Gran got sick, really sick, we had no choice but to call it quits. Gran was dying. She was nearly ninety, her lungs jammed with tar, and her heart tired from a life lived entirely alone. Still, she dreamed of one last adventure before the end: a monthlong road trip across England. Taking the hint, Nellie and I replaced the long-dead battery in Gran’s old cherry-red MG, pumped up the tires, rolled down the roof, and hit the road: Nellie at the wheel, me and Gran snuggled up together in the back. For the next thirty days, we hurtled along the Cornish coast, to Land’s End, through the Midlands, into London, and back to Edinburgh. We lived on ice cream and beer and greasy fish and chips. We hardly slept, we visited every pub we came across, we flirted with the locals, cried until we laughed, laughed until we pissed ourselves. Gran died one week after we returned to her cottage, warm and cozy in her bed. Her heart, she said, was at last full. Nellie and I lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves that day, but before Gran closed her eyes that final time, I asked her if she was afraid of death, the horrid uncertainty of it, of not knowing what came next. She flashed me a toothless grin and burst out in a throaty smoker’s laugh. “Ah, but all life is uncertain, hen,” she said, still giggling at the absurdity of my question, “and all control an illusion. You’ve just got to learn to be OK with that.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Emma Oxley and Nellie Yarrow have been inseparable their whole lives. Ever since they reinvented themselves, changing their names and wiping clean their digital footprints, they have made a game of following wherever the next adventure leads and challenging themselves to thefts, street cons, and mind games.

Adhering to only two rules—they will only swindle men, and only ones who deserve it—Emma and Nellie are secure in their reputation as the most trustworthy swindlers on the European black market. Until suddenly, they must play to save their own lives.

Blackmailed into stealing a priceless bracelet from a high-security exhibit, Emma will reexamine everything she believed to be true. This heist takes her far beyond her comfort zone…and she and Nellie will need allies among the glitzy bejeweled gathering in London in order to survive. Will they be able to do the right thing before it’s too late?
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Meet the Author:

Tess Amy was born in Johannesburg but now enjoys a nomadic lifestyle, living between Europe and South Africa. She holds a master’s degree from The Durban University of Technology, is an outdoor enthusiast, animal lover and unfaltering optimist.
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