What Could Possibly Go Wrong (2025)

This was a change of direction from wild crimes and cons. The publisher was interested in the idea of crazy inventions. That was interesting to me, too, but after digging deeper into the subject, I found there were plenty of terrible ideas for inventions, but only a few were entertaining, like the combination food-storage container, cheese grater, and flytrap (yes, really!).

But the real story was in the dreams of the inventors. Like the criminals in my earlier books, these were often people with lofty aspirations of changing the world and making it big as an inventor. But they didn’t always account for the human element. Whether it’s mousetraps (of which there are thousands) or manned flight, most inventions are flops. Some people certainly do make big money from patents, but it’s not usually the inventors.