Scams!, a paean to both the con artist’s imagination and the victim’s gullibility, is Andreas Schroeder’s first book for young readers and the latest in Annick’s True Stories from the Edge series.

In Scams!, Schroeder, the author of more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, has collected 10 swindles and tricks, ranging from an 18th-century creator of bogus Shakespeare plays to a Filipino politician who in the 1970s convinced the scientific world that he had discovered a lost Stone Age tribe. There is also an introduction explaining the definition of a scam, which is just as well since some of the stories (Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, for example) don’t seem to be what’s generally considered a con trick.

The tales are varied and interesting and Schroeder’s style is light and readable. His use of colloquialisms, such as describing the Filipino politician as a “party animal,” and his occasional asides to the reader add to the text’s accessibility and give even the 200-year-old tales an immediacy that will appeal to readers today.

A few of the stories – for example, Donald Crowhurst’s descent into madness on a round-the-world yacht race – cry out for more depth, but overall, readers will be left in awe of the perpetrator’s audacity and the mark’s gullibility. It’s fascinating that some of the scams still seem to work even after they’ve been exposed. For example, broadcasts of War of the Worlds have led to panic and rioting as recently as 1988.

Fans of the series and neophytes will enjoy this lively book. At a time when every third e-mail seems to be a scam, it’s good for young readers to become familiar with a few of the classics