A Victorian con woman schemes for money and love in zesty novel. She’s not the only one.

If we are to believe novelists, England in the 1700s and 1800s featured two kinds of women: those who sat at home stewing about lost suitors, and con artists.

It used to be that books featured a whole bunch of the former but, in recent years, the scales have tipped in the direction of pickpockets and shysters, as evidenced by Alex Hay’s brand-new “The Queen of Fives.” Its (anti-?) heroine leads a collective of confidence women. She schemes to marry herself out of a life of crime and into a stately mansion, or maybe she’ll just swipe the money and forget the inconvenient husband.

She’d have plenty in common with, and probably try to pull the wool over the eyes of, heroines of recent books such as “The Other Side of Mrs. Wood,” in which two fake mediums battle each other to take advantage of wealthy believers in spiritualism, and “The Square of Sevens,” in which a poor young fortune-teller begins to think she’s the heir to a vast estate. (For more on these other titles, see below.)

In his clever “Queen,” which was inspired by actual events, Hay is especially strong on character. The book allies us most closely with Quinn le Blanc (not her real name), who is “London’s most talented con woman” and who is assisted by shadowy Mr. Silk.

Quinn is feisty, funny and perhaps a little too convinced that she’s always the smartest person in the room, a weakness that could bring her comeuppance when she tangles with wealthy Max Kendal, who suspects there’s something awry with Quinn but seems willing to entertain her affections anyway. Two bigger problems for Quinn may be Max’s brilliant sister Tor, who is determined not to have the family fortune torn from her just because she’s a woman who cannot inherit it, and their canny stepmother, who married for money and may also be willing to kill for it.

The three main characters in “The Queen of Fives” — Quinn, Tor and Lady Kendal — all are women, which feels like a bracing corrective to most literature of the male-dominated era in which it’s set (1898). There’s definitely a feminist bent to the book (Alex Hay is a man, incidentally) but it doesn’t feel like the writer is imposing present-day thought on a book that takes place 130 years ago. Instead, it feels like he’s acknowledging that women were central to the way Victorian England worked (see, also: Queen Vicky herself), even if it was not always acknowledged that they were calling the shots.

Another compelling element of this page-turner, and of several of the books below, is an awareness that con games are a way to bring together people from social classes that wouldn’t generally mix.

Quinn, like many of her swindler sisters, is not well-off. Having lost a few valued clients, she and Silk are making ends meet by cutting meat from their diet and letting scullery maids go. Their cash-strapped ilk wouldn’t generally be hanging out with the moneyed class. But, because they supposedly offer the wealthy chances to communicate with dead loved ones or because they can create the illusion that they possess the money to participate in expensive events like charity balls, con artists get to hang with lots of rich dopes — er, dupes. Well, both.

One thing we realize, along the way, is that almost nobody is who they pretend to be. That can range from a con woman posing as an eligible heiress, to a wealthy heir with a romantic life he hides, to a domineering stepmother with secrets of her own.

As the entertaining twists pile up in “The Queen of Fives,” a case could be made that, like the characters in the book, we’re all tricksters. And that the biggest trick we play is fooling ourselves that we aren’t.

The Queen of Fives

By: Alex Hay.

Publisher: Graydon House, 375 pages, $28.99.

If you’re into exploring the pros and cons of prose about cons, you might also try these books with strong female characters who have light fingers:

The Other Side of Mrs. Wood, Lucy Barker

There’s an “All About Eve” element to “Other Side,” in which an established medium takes in an apprentice, who quickly begins stealing her tactics and wealthy clients. Their witty battle is plenty of fun, as are the book’s behind-the-scenes details. There’s a gossip columnist who bloviates about which medium is currently the hottest in London (something similar appears in “Queen of Fives” and also existed in real-life Victorian London) and much attention is paid to the custom-built cabinet, stuffed with props and other trickery that Mrs. Wood uses to fool her clients.

The Square of Sevens, Laura Shepherd-Robinson

It’s set about 100 years earlier than these other books, in the late 1700s, and it’s a bit more heartfelt. We meet main character Red as a child with an otherworldly gift, traveling with her father from town to town to make a living and to avoid unnamed enemies that her father fears. Soon, he’s dead and Red finds herself the ward of a wealthy nobleman. That’s all great but Red longs to know who her mother was and she follows a trail of clues that leads her into the orbit of two wealthy families. Like all of these books, one theme of “Square” is that people who make their living with dark arts such as fortune-telling are simply more obvious about their cons than others are. And principled, good-hearted Red may be the best lead character in any of these novels.

Fingersmith, Sarah Waters

This book is the oldest (2002) and the one of these you’re most likely to already have read but I’m including it because it’s so clearly an influence on the subsequent novels. It’s largely set in the English countryside, not London, but its heroine, Sue, is a Dickens-inspired (specifically, “Oliver Twist”-inspired) orphan who is pressed into service in a scheme to defraud a wealthy girl and her inattentive uncle. It’s a rip-roaring adventure with tons of reversals and, when Sue and the wealthy girl become very good friends, it introduces the subject of cautious but passionate queerness, something that pops up in several later books that owe a debt to Water’s masterpiece.