A Grifter’s Song is a novella anthology series created and edited by Frank Zafiro and published by Down and Out Books. It begins with The Concrete Smile, which was a finalist for the 2020 Derringer Award, and continues for five seasons and thirty-five episodes.
The series features a pair of grifters, Sam and Rachel, who are lifelong grifters in their late thirties. Their past is as shadowy as their present, but we know that they pulled a major long con on the mafia in Philadelphia, and now they are on the run. While one or the other may speak longingly of that quiet life in a beach house somewhere at the end of the rainbow, we all know that the likelihood is that they will never leave this life, unless it is in a box. They are who they are, and so they continue to find and exploit marks, trying to stay one step ahead of the mobsters bent on vengeance.
Each episode is a standalone story but is also part of the meta tale that evolves over the course of the series. The first episode, the final episode (and a few others) were written by Frank Zafiro, with a cast of twenty-nine other authors contributing to remainder of the series.
The novellas take place all over the United States, and each story features a different con that Sam and Rachel work in their attempt to make enough money to stay one step ahead of the mobsters who want to kill them.
Seasons of A Grifter’s Song:
*If you’d like to hear a retrospective on the entire series, featuring commentary from the authors who wrote eache episode, check out my podcast, Wrong Place, Write Crime.
**If you’d like to get the inside scoop on the backstory of how this came to be, I wrote an article for ITW about it.
A Grifter’s Song was named as one of the best TRULY independent titles of 2022!