Library Journal
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In 2015, two CNN journalists picked up a piece of junk mail that would obsess them for the next three years. For more than 30 years, a psychic named Marie Duvall sent personalized letters to millions of vulnerable people worldwide, many elderly and friendless or those worried about their financial future. The recipients were convinced to send checks to the psychic, purchasing cheap "luck charms" and being promised a financial windfall in the future. After hearing some victims' tales, the reporters were determined to track down the psychic behind the scam. Wading through layers of shell companies and accomplices, with the help of law enforcement officials whose efforts to stop the scam were stymied by international boundaries, they stumbled toward the woman behind the multimillion-dollar business-but was she really the mastermind? Mail fraud is a frustrating tangle, but the authors do their best to lay it out for readers, and their tales of the shady characters they encounter along the way make for a thrilling adventure. VERDICT This entertaining account expands on a 2016 CNN five-part series and will be enjoyed by lovers of real-life con stories.-Deirdre Bray Root, -formerly with MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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In this meandering true crime account, journalists Ellis and Hicken investigate a decades-long international mail scam that bilked over $200 million from its 1.4 million victims in the United States alone. The mastermind behind it all was an elusive, self-proclaimed psychic who went by the alias Maria Duval and has never been apprehended. The authors, who first wrote about Duval for CNN in 2016, detail the methodology of her scam, which dates to at least the 1980s and involved mailing personalized letters to recipients, whose names and addresses Duval purchased from data brokers. Their investigation leads to a bizarre cast of characters, including a gun-toting U.S. postal inspector hell-bent on shutting down the scam, an alien-worshipping businessman whose companies distributed Duval's mass mailings, and a handful of zany psychics. The book gets sidetracked by frustrating dead ends in the inquiry-a chapter devoted entirely to a psychic named Patrick Guerin, for example, ends abruptly when the journalists receive no reply to one brief e-mail. While the authors never conclusively identify the person behind the Maria Duval alias, they provide an entertaining exposé of an epic episode from the chronicles of consumer fraud. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

On the trail of a French psychic who ran an international scam that preyed on some of society's most vulnerable people.In their first book, Ellis and Hicken, investigative journalists with CNN, build on their five-part online piece that first appeared on the CNN website in 2016, and the narrative morphs into a meandering tale full of dead ends, frustrations, and irrelevant details. The authors doggedly pursue the story of a long-lasting con targeting the lonely and credulous with promises of riches and friendship. Their investigation involves an unwieldy cast of characters, which the authors helpfully identify at the beginning of the book. However, many readers will still struggle to follow this Byzantine journey to uncover more information about Maria Duval, a self-proclaimed psychic whose name is on the millions of letters sent out to extract money from the gullible. The scam is reported to have affected more than 1.6 million victims in the United States and Canada, along with uncounted more across the globe. Ellis and Hicken provide a clear picture of the mindset of victims, showing why they were taken in by the scam and how their lives and those of their families were affected. These poor men and women, often demented and elderly (a demographic that loses "nearly $3 billion to fraud and other financial abuses every year") and often mired in poverty, believed that by mailing money to Duval, they could change their lives for the better and become fantastically wealthy. The authors' account of their attempts to track down Duval is less engaging. Their search for Duval is a wild-goose chase made difficult by their language limitations, by quirky email leads that do not pan out, and by unanswered correspondence and unreturned phone calls. Their uncertainties, questions, and disappointments figure largely in their discursive narrative.It's a fascinating story of widespread malfeasance, but readers hoping for crisp, incisive reporting will be disappointed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.