Created by John Shepphird
After a good long run fleecing suckers and relieving the gullible and greedy of their cash, a series of mishaps and a personal tragedy that left his beloved girlfriend Mona dead convinces JACK O’SHEA, con artist extraordinaire, that it’s time to clean up his act.
Well, more or less…
He tells all (or at least selected bits of “all”) in a popular book that “hovered about the New York Times Bestseller List for about fifteen seconds” and sets himself up as a private detective; the sole operative at O’Shea Investigations with an office in Culver City that he shares with Buttermilk Suzie, the former racing greyhound he adopted. The affable O’Shea calls himself a “deception specialist” and he specializes in helping out clients who have been scammed themselves, relying on his own unique background, in a series of low-key but enjoyable short stories, the first of which nabbed him a Best Short Story Shamus in 2013.
The author is a writer and director of TV, movies and independent films, with such cinematic classics as The Santa Trap, Jersey Shore Shark Attack and Snowboard Academy in his C.V. but don’t hold that against him — the O’Shea stories are well worth tracking down, as are his various novellas and books , which seem to mostly involve scam artists and the film-making industry. He’s also written the iPrivateEye series for Hooked, an online site/app featuring bite-size flash fiction told through text messages.
SHORT STORIES
- “Ghost Negligence” (July/August 2012, AHMM)
- “Of Dogs and Deceit” (November 2014, AHMM)
- “Electric Boogaloo” (September/October 2017, AHMM)
RELATED LINKS
- On the Con
Scam Artist Eyes
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
