The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Catch Me If You Can in this riveting, stranger-than-fiction story of the French con artist whose crimes span decades and continents. In 2019, veteran journalist Mark Seal began investigating the suspicious death of music mogul Peter Ikin. Just 32 days before he was found dead in his Paris hotel room, Ikin had married a handsome, debonair Frenchman named Alexandre, who would claim to be entitled to his late husband’s fortune. As Seal dug into the case, he had no idea that tracing the incredible life of Alexandre Despallieres would take him from Paris to London to Beverly Hills, and unspool a web of intricate plots and deceptions that, for a time, made Despallieres a millionaire and left multiple alleged victims dead in his wake. Mark Seal uncovers impossible stories about a man who seems to evade justice at every turn.
Author
A journalist for thirty-five years, Mark Seal is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Death in Africa, about the murdered wildlife filmmaker and naturalist Joan Root. Seal was a 2010 National Magazine Award finalist for his Vanity Fair profile of Clark Rockefeller. He lives in Aspen, Colorado.
