About Ordinary Fraud, Quiet Betrayal, and the People Who Fight Back
Every con artist in Homegrown Crooks has a house key. They are daughters collecting benefits for a woman who has been dead three years. They are nurses who were never nurses at all. They are siblings spending down a family trust while the youngest member of the household cannot even keep the lights on. Virginia R. Youngren’s debut collection gathers eight stories about people who steal, lie, forge, and manipulate, not from the shadows, but from the kitchen table.
The stories in this collection span settings and circumstances with a deliberate breadth. In one, a Mexican American cleaning worker named Lucia turns her phone camera into a weapon against a supervisor who has been faking a disability. In another, a psychotherapist named Penny races between Austin and Houston trying to protect her elderly aunt from a con woman posing as a home care nurse. Elsewhere, a young woman named Maya survives a night of terror on a remote island armed with nothing more than a pot of scalding hot chili sauce and an unshakable nerve.
Youngren writes about crime, but the real subject is trust. Who deserves it. Who abuses it. What it costs to extend it to the wrong person and what it costs to withhold it from the right one. Her characters are janitors, veterinarians, physical therapists, real estate agents, and convenience store clerks. They live in ranch bungalows and suburban tract homes and temporary hospital apartments. The crimes they commit and witness are not the stuff of headlines. They are the stuff of family court, bank fraud departments, and adult protective services.
What lifts the collection is the writing itself. Youngren has an ear for dialogue that is specific and alive. Her scenes are built with the economy of a playwright. Characters reveal themselves through what they do and what they refuse to do, and the reader is rarely told what to think about any of them. A brother who hides in his attic to avoid signing legal papers is absurd and sympathetic in equal measure. A stepdaughter who cannot stop crying over the woman who just robbed her stepmother is heartbreaking precisely because the reader can see what she cannot.
The longest story, “Snake in the Grass,” follows three half-siblings fighting over a family trust, a wellness center, and a patch of wild land that turns out to contain human remains buried decades ago by a Cajun stepmother who practiced Hoodoo medicine. It is a story about inheritance in every sense of the word, the money, the land, the grudges, and the strange legacies that parents leave behind whether they mean to or not.
The final story, “A Thief and a Kleptomaniac,” is a quiet masterwork of misdirection. Three women share a household. One has a compulsive stealing disorder. Another is drowning in debt and desperate for a savior. The third, the one who appears most professional and put together, is methodically draining the homeowner’s bank accounts using a forged identity. The reader watches all three women with growing unease, unsure until the very end whose hands are clean.
The book will be available soon globally.
About the Author
Virginia R. Youngren is a writer whose fiction draws from close observation of human behavior, family dynamics, and the moral territory where most people actually live. Homegrown Crooks is her debut collection. She lives in the United States.
Media Contact
For review copies, author interviews, or additional materials:
Email: virginia.youngren@gmail.com
