Recently I finished THE DON JUAN CON by Sara Williams. All women should read this important book. The story deals with a slimy con man who preys upon lonely women. As a reader, you’ll realize how easily this could happen to yourself or someone you know. The story takes on more thriller characteristics as the villain’s relationship to our heroine is revealed. Thank goodness for Angie, who wants to catch the man who deceived her. But as she hunts his trail, she learns things about herself best left forgotten. It’s a fast suspenseful read about a subject that could touch any one of us. Sara Williams has done her homework. The settings are real, the people compelling, and the story will make you wary of who you meet.
Here is an interview with the author:
1. What inspired you to write this story?
I was a green newspaper reporter on the Fort-Myers News Press in the mid eighties. A woman walked into the newsroom and demanded help. She was a single mother of two children. She had been romanced out of an insurance settlement that she desperately needed to pay her bills. She
told us that these sweetheart swindlers routinely duped women out of their assets and got away with it. The crime reporter wouldn't touch the story. If a woman gives her money to her boyfriend, is it a crime? That's the attitude that permeates our justice system. Since I was a lifestyle reporter who liked psychology, the editors had me write it as a he/said she/said story. Few women who are swindled like this will come forward but my subject didn't care. Therefore, we got cooperation from detectives around the South. We got on the trail of the con artist and other reporters got on the story and swapped sources with me; I wound up with a terrific background in the subject, which I internalized. Years later, I'd see snippets of this story on TV crime shows. They always made the victims look stupid. I was outraged all over again. I thought we'd stamped out these characters. I was inspired to write Don Juan as a novel so that women could see and feel the devastation and havoc these swindlers cause. It's a form of emotional rape.
2. Have you known someone personally affected by one of these con men?
Absolutely. I'm working now with a woman I met on Thanksgiving day. A real estate executive in her 40s with a six-figure a year income who was swindled by an airline pilot. She's gorgeous, looks like a fashion model and desperately wanted a child; he desperately wanted her money. After he fleeced her for about $600,000, he suddenly lost interest in her. Then she finds out he has several other romances going. This gutzy lady is going to campaign with me. I walked out of a TV interview in Jacksonville, only to be told by the anchor woman that a colleague of hers in Miami had been swindled like this; a U.S. Senator and her father were swindled by her lover; the brilliant woman who became mayor of Mexico city was swindled out of her family and her career by a con artist. I can rarely do a book signing without hearing another story; my record is Sarasota B&N where I heard five accounts in one night, including one from a woman who was in the store's management. Sadly, however, most people are still stuck back at square one. Any woman this happens to has to be stupid.
3. How would you warn women against this type of criminal?
A wise old publisher told me years ago that you can't teach anybody anything. You have to entertain them. I wrote The Don Juan Con as a suspense novel so that women who read the book can get wise to how these prince charmings operate. They pick on vulnerable women; they are
brilliant at reading psychological cues and they offer to fulfill the victim's dreams. I also proposed founding a national data base devoted to fraud in a national PR release last summer because this is an area where our justice system offers very little in the way of support. While
trolling the internet I discovered CUFF, a group of female detectives who already have the data base in place. I'm going to do a PR campaign with various victims who agree to come forward so that I can raise awareness of this issue, and of course it does work in reverse. There are females who swindle men. (www.straightshooter.net)
4. What is coming next in your repertoire?
Next on the agenda? I love places of great regional diversity, for instance the southwest tales of Tony Hillerman. My second novel was THE SERENOA SCANDAL about Florida's tropical wild west, in the Okeechobee country. This was my way of preserving places like LaBelle and
Clewiston, now being four-laned out of existence. I borrowed the Babcock ranch as a model; Serenoa was picked up by
PBS Florida during the state's campaign to purchase the ranch for preservation. At any rate, the detective character, John Spyer, is hapa haole, half Hawaiian. In my
next novel, he goes home and connects with his roots, my way of exploring the old Polynesian culture of Hawaii, where I lived for a decade. The Polynesian heritage of Hawaii is still alive, providing a fascinating underpinning of a state that in most peoples' minds is somewhere left of Dog the Bounty Hunter and right of Bay Watch.
For more details, please visit Sara’s website: www.sarawilliamsnovelist.com