Hi, hello friends! I’m so excited to share that Kyla Zhao, author of The Fraud Squad is our latest tea party guest! I’ve been hyped for The Fraud Squad ever since I heard about a The Devil Wears Prada meets Inventing Anna meets Crazy Rich Asians book, and loved the chance to pick Kyla’s brain a little more!
For as long as she can remember, Samantha Song has dreamed of writing for a high-society magazine—and she’d do anything to get there. But the constant struggle to help her mom make ends meet and her low social status make her dream feel like a distant fantasy.
Now, Sam finds herself working at a drab PR firm. The closest she’ll get to that life is living vicariously through her socialite coworker and friend, Anya Chen. Then she meets Timothy Kingston: the disillusioned son of one of Singapore’s elite families—and Sam’s one chance at infiltrating the high society world to which she desperately wants to belong.
To Sam’s surprise, Tim and Anya both agree to help her make a name for herself on Singapore’s socialite scene. The borrowed designer clothes and plus-ones to every glamorous event can only get her so far; the rest is on Sam, and she’s determined to make an impression on the editor-in-chief of Singapore’s poshest magazine. But the deeper Sam wades into this fraud, the more she fears being exposed—especially with a mysterious gossip columnist on the prowl for dirt—forcing her to reconcile her pretense with who she really is before she loses it all.
Links for The Fraud Squad: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
Hi Kyla! Thank you so much for joining our tea party today! We’re so happy you’re here 
For our tea party guests who are meeting you for the first time, can you tell us a little about yourself, and The Fraud Squad?
Hi, thank you so much for having me! My debut novel The Fraud Squad is about a woman who dreams of writing for Singapore’s poshest magazine, but no one will give her a chance because of her low social status. So she enlists the help of two friends and schemes her way into Singapore high society by masquerading as a socialite, all in the hopes of impressing the magazine’s editor-in-chief (think Anna Wintour). My book has been compared to Crazy Rich Asians, The Devil Wears Prada, Gossip Girl, and Inventing Anna. You can order my debut novel at https://www.linktr.ee/kylazhao and add it on Goodreads.
As for me, I’m a native Singaporean who graduated from Stanford University in 2021. When I was younger, I also dreamed of working at a society/luxury magazine (I even wrote my college admissions essay about that), but I now work in Silicon Valley. Hah, funny how unpredictable life can be. I love matcha-flavored anything and kickboxing. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Oh, and I have a newsletter.
In The Fraud Squad, Samantha enlists the help of her socialite friends, Anya Chen & Timothy Kingston, to help her make a name for herself on Singapore’s socialite scene. If you had to cast three fictional characters (not your own) to either masquerade as a socialite or help them masquerade as a socialite, who would you choose and why?
Ooh this is a tough question! I want to say Irene Chen from Grace Li’s Portrait of a Thief. She’s seemingly so self-assured and confident, and things always somehow work out for her because of her natural charm, but I’d love to see how she fares in an environment as cut-throat as high society.
My second pick would be Nora from Tess Sharpe’s Those Girls I’ve Been. Nora was raised from a young age to be a con-woman and take on different personas, so I’d think she’d do a good job of passing herself off as a socialite (then again, high society operates by very different rules from most of the world!).
Finally, not a fictional character but Anna Delvey from Inventing Anna. I’ve some ideas for how she could have pulled off her scheme better.
I absolutely love following your Met Gala threads on Twitter, and had to ask — If Samantha was invited to the Met Gala, who do you think she’d wear? On a similar note, if The Fraud Squad was a previous Met Gala theme, what do you think it’d be?
Gilded Glamour (the theme in 2021-2022) for sure! Just like that golden era, high society is very lavish, luxurious, opulent. But all that glamor definitely comes with a grittier side, and we see my main character Samantha Song learning that as well. As she experiences the glamorous whirlwind that is Singapore high society, she gradually learns that not all that glitters is gold.
You’ve also written for Vogue Singapore, Harper’s Bazaar and Tatler. How have your experiences shaped and influenced The Fraud Squad?
Those experiences brought me up close with Singapore socialites, so I was able to observe them in their “natural habitat”, so to speak. I also realized that they are “real” people and not just their glamorous personas that the public sees online and in magazine pages. And because I had worked across a few different luxury magazines, I was able to craft an authentic portrayal of the magazine world, the luxury/fashion world, and high society. Fun fact: I worked at Harper’s Bazaar when I was only 16! My first article was writing about luxury weddings, and that was before I’ve even had my first kiss haha—very far away from experiencing a wedding myself!
Without giving too much away, what scene — or quote — was your favorite to write?
Definitely the climax that takes place at the gala (inspired by the Met Gala)! The party atmosphere is just so fun to write—the setting, the people, the fashion, the entertainment. I wrote the first draft of that scene in June 2020, at the height of social distancing during the pandemic. So I was definitely living vicariously through my characters and wishing I could be at a big, fancy gala too.
That scene is also a favorite with my readers so far because of [redacted]. That’s the point when everything falls into place and you’ll see in an unexpected way how many seemingly disparate threads have actually been woven together from the very beginning…
Finally, let’s close with a question that we ask all of our tea party guests: If The Fraud Squad was a tea party, what would be the theme of the tea party? What flavor of tea would your main characters be? What tea party treat do you think your characters would bring?
This is a great question because one scene in my book takes place at my male protagonist Tim’s tea room. That’s right, his house has a designated, temperature-controlled room just for storing, drinking, and savoring tea. That’s where Samantha learns that there are tea bricks (Google this!) worth a few million dollars…and of course Tim’s family owns a whole collection of them. This might sound overly fanciful, but trust me, there are people in real life with tea rooms like this in their houses.
Born and raised in Singapore, Kyla Zhao graduated in 2021 from Stanford University with an MA in Communications (Media Studies) and BA in Psychology. Right now, she works in marketing at a tech company in Silicon Valley, California.
Besides novel-writing, Kyla has an extensive magazine editorial portfolio. Previously, she was a fashion and lifestyle writer at Vogue Singapore. She has also written for the Singapore editions of Harper’s Bazaar and Tatler, covered the Asian Television Awards, and interviewed personalities such as singer Nathan Sykes.
