Aldon Bakker is a man who tells lies for fun and profit on the internet, so when he’s entrusted with the delivery of a mysterious notebook as the dying wish of tech billionaire and old rival Grant Wisniewski, he’s reluctant to do the job. Aldon and Grant were the founding members of the group of recreational hoaxers who called themselves The Club of Frauds. Surely this is Grant Wisniewski’s last great hoax? Grant, it would seem, would like Aldon to believe that the world is run by a hidden cabal of artificial intelligences called The Patronage. The notebook is crucial to their plans and their undoing. But he and The Club of Frauds invented The Patronage. It’s not real. Is it?

As Aldon’s professional, digital, and financial life is dismantled, he’s forced to deliver the notebook to his paranoiac former co-conspirator Brother Victor, now in retreat at a monastery in the Apennine mountains.

The Club of Frauds is literary thriller about our era, right now, when we can no longer rely on the dictum that seeing is believing. When internet forces beyond our control can take over our lives and obliterate our identities, creating new ones for us – for anyone. And they can leave us perpetually unsure whether what is before our eyes is real.