Craig, Peter. Hot plastic. New York: Hyperion, 2004. ISBN 1-4013-0044-8.

Summary: A middle-aged con man and his fourteen-year-old son, a geeky, mildly obsessive-compulsive apprentice to his father's trade, pick up a tough-talking runaway teenage girl who specializes in shoplifting. With the son as the point-of-view character, the book recounts episodes from the ensuing six years of their hapless criminal careers, alternately demonstrating how easy it is to pull off lucrative scams and how unpleasant the consequences are when they don't work quite right. The foreseeable instability of a team of con artists -- the inevitability of their attempts to cheat each other, no matter how much they talk about trust and the mutual advantages of cooperation -- is another major theme.

The title reflects the fact that many of the schemes described in the book involve fakery with credit cards. The father, who has a vestigial moral sense, has convinced himself that credit-card scams harm only banks and have no effect on the ordinary people who actually use the cards.