THE REFUND

Denny Kowalski has raised four million dollars for an AI trading algorithm that doesn't exist. He's not a criminal mastermind ? he's a guy in a hoodie who's very good at talking, mediocre at everything else, and increasingly convinced that his own pitch deck is basically true. Eleven investors believe him: a dentist, a Lions lineman, a grocery chain owner who worked twenty years for every dollar he's about to lose.

Vera Adamik believes him too. Sort of.

At sixty-one, Vera spent three decades quietly fencing stolen auto parts before retiring into a life of Rotary breakfasts, a car wash on Telegraph Road, and a bookkeeping system designed to survive a federal audit. She's seen a hundred men like Denny ? and she's never once needed to raise her voice to take something from one of them. She doesn't want to expose his fraud. She wants to inherit it, one careful transfer at a time, before it collapses on its own and takes eleven ordinary people's savings down with it.

All she needs is patience, her reluctant tech-savvy nephew, and a car wash with terrible bookkeeping.

What follows is a slow-motion heist nobody else knows is happening ? Denny lying to his investors, Vera lying to Denny, an FBI agent building a case against exactly the wrong person, and a retired collections man circling in from a third direction entirely. Everyone in this book is certain they're the smartest person in the room. Almost none of them are right.

The Refund is a comic crime novel about money, confidence, and who actually gets to build something real in a city that stopped handing out easy answers a long time ago ? for readers of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, and Donald Westlake, who like their cons clean, their dialogue dry, and their villains a little bit lovable.