By Steve Sheinkin
The true, wild story of two cousins who fooled some of the richest men in America into believing they'd found a diamond mine out West.
In 1870 two Kentucky cousins, Philip Arnold and John Slack, walked into a San Francisco investor's office with a bag of rough diamonds and a tall tale about a secret mine out in the West. It was a con, a huge one, and they pulled it off well enough that expert engineers, bankers, and business tycoons handed over fortunes. Steve Sheinkin tells the whole true caper like a heist movie, and Jon Chad's comic panels drop in to show the best bits, right up to the last-minute hero who cracked the whole thing open.
This is the trick Sheinkin does better than almost anyone: real history that reads faster than a made-up thriller, because the thing actually happened. The short chapters, the swindle-of-the-week momentum, and Jon Chad's comics scattered through make it land easily with a child who thinks 'nonfiction' means boring. A reluctant reader gets a heist story; they just happen to be learning real American history while they race through it.