Worlds collide in the thrilling conclusin to The Heist Society trilogy when one of their own becomes the mark of an insidious long con and tests the line between business and personal feelings.

And for once, Kat may not be able to steal it back.

The client is Marianne, the sister to Hale’s faithful butler, Marcus. The mark is Hale himself, now the minor heir of the Hale empire, bequethed by the only person Hale ever trusted and vice versa, his grandmother.
Unfortunately, Hale’s trustee is the sleazy family lawyer and cover-up fixer, Garrett and he may have fixed the will in his favor.

Yeah, you can see the personal dilemma for Kat as she sees how much it means to Hale that his grandmother trusted him to take over the company only for it to be because Garrett chose him as an easy mark.

Unlike, other enemies, Garrett is not a career criminal. He just holds all the family blackmail including Hale’s. . . which is actually Kat’s. This is his first long-con and unlike previous antagonists, he doesn’t appreciate the artistry of what Kat’s family does. He’s just a greedy son of a bitch which makes him desperate, dangerous and unpredictable.

But the bigger issue is how much personal stake Hale has in this alongside the grief that he’s working through. It’s difficult for Kat to see Hale slipping away from her to his real family. A family full of richness, greed and apathy that she doesn’t belong to. She’s the “secret girlfriend” and it’s infruiriating and scary for her to finally give her heart to someone that she may lose.

It was interesting to see Kat thrown off balance in a new way as her expertise is not corporate espionage and sabotoge. She’s not the one who’s slipping from internal dilemmas. Hale is, and it shows how vital he is to the group when he is off his game. It also presents a bit of difficulty for a girl who is so not used to emotional openness to try to help him. You can feel the helplessness in both of them, Hale’s grief as well as Kat because she cannot control the situation or fix the time so Hale can have the space to heal.

It’s even more urgent as there’s three separate heists that they have to pull out to outwit Garrett which is why the old guard is called in.

I’ll admit, while the usual suspects (Hamish, Angus, Gabrielle, Simon) are present, they kind of faded into the background in this novel which is a bit unfortunate as a last hurrah. Same with Nick and his Interpol connections who provide vital help but lack the tension that came with the previous novels. I wish she had explored it more. Same with a new character, Natalie, who appears to be Hale’s Kat before he met Kat but her potential arc gets sadly sidelined.

But it’s the older generation pulling the cons and I was able to figure it out before the grand reveal, but it doesn’t detract from the convoluted awesomeness. Seriously, no wonder they’re the masters.

But it’s Kat and Hale’s connection that truly center the book and through the twisting hand of fate, Carter makes a plausible arguement that it could have gone many different ways the day that Hale invited himself to Kat’s world, but maybe fate would always have brought them together. No matter, they have changed each other for good.

So while, the original masters was awesome, I felt like the Kat/Hale romance sucked up all the attention from the other characters, preventing it from being a truly epic finale. Instead I just wanted more. There’s so much more to see like Nick’s clandestine involvement in their activities, Visaly Romani may be setting Kat as a protege of sorts, Hale’s real name?

Perfect Scoundrels ends with 3 stars but who knows, in this decade of reboots, I would not be opposed to a grand comeback from our favorite family of thieves.