Unmasking Samantha Cookes: The Many Lives of a Serial Fraudster Author: Alan Bradley ISBN-13: 978-1785375934 Publisher: Merrion PressGuideline Price: €18.99For more than a decade, Samantha Cookes conned her way into a series of families and communities on both sides of the Irish Sea, posing as a nanny, a therapist and, eventually, a terminally ill, award-winning author.Documentary maker Alan Bradley, part of the team behind Bad Nanny, a two-part exposé of Cookes, chronicles the life of the serial fraudster and the trail of destruction she left in her wake. He meets some of her former friends, including her first real boyfriend, and uncovers a trail of lies, from invented illnesses to fake pregnancies. The devastating death of Cookes’s first child, Martha, in 2009, who suffocated when sleeping beside her mother, changed her forever, but not in the way one might expect. Bradley argues: “It built a darker architecture inside her, a place where fabrications could live and breathe.” Her lies subsequently “hardened into something purposeful and predatory”.In February 2010 Cookes offered herself as a surrogate for Yorkshire couple Katie and Luke Taylor, before taking their money and disappearing, for which she received a suspended sentence in October 2011.Cookes was formally diagnosed with pseudologia fantastica, whereby she fabricated stories so intricate that she often believed them herself, as well as narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders. The British courts believed Cookes was potentially a danger to her two living children, who were removed and placed for adoption.[ The Samantha Cookes story: Inside the mind of a pathological liarOpens in new window ]In Ireland, her scams and schemes became ever more fantastical, until her “crowning achievement”, Carrie Jade Williams, “a symphony of deception, vulnerability and calculated cruelty”. When a fake Airbnb complaint went viral, Cookes finally flew too close to the social media sun, as those she had deceived recognised the face of the woman purporting to be the terminally ill writer.Cookes weaponised trust and sympathy, mercilessly preying on some of the most vulnerable within society, including the parents of children with special needs, while her spurious compensation claim against St Vincent de Paul will have most readers spitting nails.Bradley writes brilliantly, setting out the facts with the poise of a forensic investigator and the pacing of a thriller writer, so that even those familiar with the story remain heavily invested in turning the pages in a frantic bid to see justice served. Superb.John Walshe is a freelance book reviewer