The Grifters

Erin Gallagher is a 20-year-old literary superstar, who skyrocketed to fame after publishing her harrowing memoir of poverty and abuse in small-town Nebraska. Found wandering down the side of the highway at the age of 14, she was rescued by the woman who would later become both her adoptive mother and professional manager. After spending months completely mute, the brave girl was rehabilitated by writing down the story of a grisly murder that she had been forced to participate in. Within a year, she went from motel-to-motel homelessness with her saintly guardian to traveling through the celebrity circuit of talk-shows, readings, and hotels with mints on the pillow.

It's a real Cinderella story - Too bad it's all a lie.

Erin Gallagher is really a barely-literate boy named Burke Topica, abducted in the sixth grade by a teacher named Clark Winters after their romantic affair went public. Clark Winter, the real author of the fraudulent memoir, has been posing as a woman and using the cover of their new identity to flea statutory rape charges that sent the two of them into hiding when Burke was only 12. Now he and his much-younger lover are loaded with money and disguised in plain sight, without a care in the world.

Not a care, that is, until a childhood friend of Burke's recognizes her former classmate and claims the identity of a fictional character from the memoir in a plan to extort the couple. Between training her to play the part and placating her outrageous demands (including an out-of-control scratch-off lotto addiction), neither of them realize until too late that she has her eyes on more than money-

She wants to steal Burke, her first love, back from the predator who stole their childhoods.