The Scammer

• Author: Tiffany D. Jackson
• Genre: YA Mystery/Thriller
• Publication Date: October 7, 2025
• Publisher: Quill Tree Books

Thank you to Quill Tree Books for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

JORDYN MONROE IS FINALLY FREE.

Out from under her overprotective parents, Jordyn is ready to kill it in prelaw at a prestigious historically Black university in Washington, DC. Kappa parties and student government better watch their backs.

AND SHE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE.

When her roommate’s brother is released from prison, the last thing Jordyn expects is to come home and find the ex-convict on their dorm room sofa. But Devonte just needs a place to stay while he gets back on his feet—and how could she say no to one of her new best friends?

Devonte is older, and as charming as he is intelligent, pushing every student he meets to make better choices about their young lives. But Jordyn senses something sinister beneath his friendly advice and growing group of followers. When one of Jordyn’s other roommates goes missing, she must enlist the help of the university’s lone white student to uncover the mystery—or become trapped at the center of a web of lies more tangled than she can imagine.

I have read a few books by Tiffany D. Jackson, and enjoyed all of them. While I don’t read much YA these days, this one straddles the line between YA and NA. And I also love the way that Jackson’s books typically merge mystery/thriller elements with some horror-lite (as I like to call it), yet they don’t step all the way into scary-horror. The idea for this came from the events at Sarah Lawrence with Larry Ray, which I knew nothing about before reading the book. Now that I know it’s inspired by factual events, I am watching the series about Sarah Lawrence on Hulu. It’s called Stolen Youth, if you’re wondering.

The early chapters bring me back to the exhilarating feeling of starting my adult life(or so I thought at the time) and meeting the people I was going to be living with in college. There is a lot of hope on Jordyn’s part, but it quickly becomes clear that she is hiding some secrets. And so are her roommates. I went into this book with high expectations and I was prepared to love the story, but there were some things that led me not to gel with this story as much as with some of Jackson’s other books.

From early on, it is clear that Jordyn arrives at college prepared for her life to do a 180 turn. She is from an affluent Connecticut suburb, and has attended a private prep school where the population is overwhelmingly white. There is a lot of pressure placed on Jordyn to succeed academically, although further into the book, more of the pressures Jordyn has dealt with come to light.

Jordyn pushes back by refusing to enroll at Yale, as her parents had planned, and instead enrolls at Frazier University, a prestigious HBCU (historically Black college and university). I was so puzzled by the internalized racism that her parents demonstrated throughout the book: she is only allowed to wear her hair straight; she is only allowed to date white boys; there is at least one vague mention of how she is pushed into disordered eating by her mother; the way her mother referred to an esteemed HBCU as “that ghetto school” and they pretty much cut her off for attending Frazier instead of Yale. 

Throughout the whole book, Jordyn expresses so much loneliness and an overwhelming desire to make friends. At times, it’s so cringe how desperate she is to keep the new friends that she made with her three roommates. I know that many people talk about their life beginning at college, but Jordyn has prepared in a different way than most: she spent the summer reading How to Win Friends and Influence People and took in that message so she could apply it at school. It seems like the only friends she had were her brother, her ex-boyfriend, and some former classmates who were friendly with her but left her feeling more tokenized than actually befriended. None of those people stayed in her life after graduation, and it’s clear that she used to have a brother but he passed away. It’s one of the persistent secrets that Jordyn keeps until the very end of the book, and instead she tells people that she is an only child. 

Naturally, Jordyn thrives on an all-Black campus, and quickly becomes close with her roommates: Kammy, Loren, and Vanessa. They rapidly transition to found family, which is easy when you’re living with people you get along with and are away from home for the first time. I loved seeing her undo some of her mother’s harmful messaging and really start to flourish over the year. But it isn’t long before Vanessa’s brother Devonte comes and needs a place to stay. 

It isn’t long before Devonte is building up his Black queens and encouraging them to be more aware of the world around them. Initially, this endears him to them. He cleans the quad for them and does some small things in gratitude for the girls letting him stay there. But it isn’t more than a few days before he changes his tune. The four girls plan to go out to a frat party, and he throws out the line ‘if you loved me, you wouldn’t go.’

His behavior escalates quickly. He goes from lecturing all the students he crosses paths with to slowly implementing rules. Instead of finding freedom at college, the girls are facing restrictions on what they could wear, what they could eat, and Devonte’s sinister and controlling presence would eventually permeate into all areas of their lives like an abusive partner.

Maybe I would have viewed things differently if I had known about the story it was inspired by, but I really found myself struggling with a few parts of the story. Now that I know more about what happened at Sarah Lawrence, it makes me a little more willing to suspend disbelief, but that wasn’t my only criticism of the book.

At first, it isn’t unreasonable to agree to him staying just for a few days, now that he is out of prison. Inevitably, it became a few weeks, and then no one was asking him to leave. I really struggled with this part, because how was it possible for an adult man to stay in the quad with four freshmen? In the first chapter, when Jordyn checks in, an RA meeting was going to be held in the building, and that is the very last time the idea of an RA comes up. I was shocked that there weren’t floor meetings and the presence of an RA, especially for freshmen students, since they tend to provide more of a presence for incoming freshman than say, for seniors. It isn’t only the lack of RA presence and dorm oversight that had me disbelieving. As an ex-con who spent time in prison, it isn’t unreasonable to wonder what address his parole officer has on file. How was he able to just straight up live in his sister’s dorm?

Another aspect I had a hard time with was how strongly her parents had internalized racism against other Black people. It was almost as if they were holding her to a completely unattainable expectation—for her to be white—rather than encouraging her to explore her own identity. Naturally, she’s a bit repressed. On one hand, we have Jordyn striving to fit into an all-white world for her entire life, and on the other hand, there’s the one white student at Frazier, ‘white boy Nick.’ Nick is a racial opposite of Jordyn, but he also plays a huge role in the story and how things occur. Like Jordyn, he’s living in a world where he is the only person who looks different than everyone else, and it made sense that they’d eventually gravitate towards each other. I didn’t love that while so many of the characters got caught up in Devonte’s web, it winds up being a white savior to come to the rescue. Although there was plenty of outright racism in what Devonte said, he sprinkled his lies with just enough truth to make them seem real. He played the role of sharing a manifesto and attempting to lead a cult, in an environment where only a few people become suspicious of him and his motives.

There are a lot of trigger warnings in the book, but none of them are really addressed in depth. The story made it seem like internalized racism, outward racism, disordered and restrictive eating, the breakdown of family bonds, suicide, and cults are all so commonplace that they don’t really need to be explored and processed. Characters were drugged without their knowledge, and I don’t think the development of the cult around Devonte was really fleshed out. Instead of the cult taking a bit of time to develop, as if he were slowly grooming them to accept increasingly unacceptable behaviors and restrictions, it felt as though he was moving too quickly for things to really be believable or accepted by these intelligent, savvy young women and men.

The disappearance mentioned in the summary doesn’t happen until almost three quarters of the way through the book. By then, I was already so frustrated with how unrealistic so much of this was that I wasn’t exactly fully invested in the outcome—I was convinced I knew what was happening. Despite one of the roommates going missing, Jordyn is allowed to return to the dorm to stay, even if it is considered an active crime scene? 

Overall, this was an intriguing, if unrealistic, read. I had some real reservations about the way major triggers aren’t given more attention. The main characters, all of them, read as fairly flat and one-note, and I would have loved to see more of who they are as individuals. The pacing was another problem for me, with the ending feeling rushed, while the middle part of the story dragged and felt a bit repetitive. I know it sounds like there wasn’t a lot about the story that I enjoyed, but I am fascinated by cult dynamics and liked watching the way Devonte does away with expected boundaries of acceptable behavior, although in reality it would absolutely take way longer than a few months to develop that sort of control over a group. It was a little disappointing to see the potential of this idea not carry through in action, but it was a fun time to revisit my own college years.

Bottom line: If you are prepared to suspend a significant amount of belief and manage the triggers, this book is a quick read and it was enjoyable.

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