In college, I lived in one of those big houses that had a million roommates. There were always people moving in and out and while I was close with many of my roommates, others stayed for just a short while and we never got to know them very well. One of these was a woman who was a compulsive liar. She told small lies and big lies, so many lies that it hardly seemed she even noticed she was telling lies. It was like she believed them herself. She was pretty religious, the kind of religious that frowns upon sex before marriage, so we were all pretty surprised when she showed us her new engagement ring and announced her pregnancy. Then over the next couple of weeks, all her lies unraveled. Turns out she had lied about the pregnancy to her boyfriend in (presumably) an attempt to get her boyfriend to propose, but then floundered when he insisted on being involved in the pregnancy and going to all her doctor appointments with her. 
No lies could deter him and she finally confessed all, much to his dismay. They broke up, but she continued lying about the situation and everything under the sun. Luckily we weren’t in her path of destruction, just witness to it for a short time. It turns out these kinds of people are fairly common.
In Duped which is half memoir, half pop-psychology in the vein of Jon Ronson, Ellin examines all kinds of liars, especially the ones that seem to do it compulsively with no remorse or awareness, just like my old roommate. Ellin started dating a man she refers to as the Commander. He was charming and lovely and always had something interesting to tell her about his history and life. He was a secret spy, he was a doctor, he was a talented photographer, etc etc. She eventually started to see the cracks in his stories after they were engaged and had moved in together. Shockingly, her confronting him about it did not go well. They broke up, she moved out, and a couple years later she had investigators calling her because the Commander was a criminal and would eventually go to jail.
Ellin was glad to have her suspicious confirmed, but horrified about how deeply she’d been duped. Her coping mechanism was to investigate her situation and others like it. It turns out it’s really, really easy to be duped, even if you think you won’t. The truth is that we generally interact with most strangers with a certain level of trust from the beginning. Life would be pretty stressful if we went into every interaction with zero trust.
Ellin does a good job of presenting her research and story in an open and appealing way. She’s clearly somewhat traumatized by her experiences, but she’s not looking for revenge here, just understanding. This book would probably have wide appeal to many readers. If you like true crime, memoirs, or pop psychology, this might be one to pick up.