For years, my work has involved diving deep into complex realities. Whether that means untangling the history of our food safety networks or investigating the unpredictable science of sleep, I have found myself drawn to the same central theme in every narrative nonfiction project. It is the persistent human tendency to build elaborate systems that do not quite work the way we intended. We crave control. We want the ledger to balance.

That fascination is exactly what pulled me into the world of my new thriller, Almost Enough.

After finishing White Out, I wanted my second fiction novel to explore the ultimate modern illusion of control. I chose the hyper-secure smart home. Setting the story right here in my own backyard of Ketchum, Idaho, provided the perfect contrast. Outside, you have the rugged, indifferent reality of the Wood River Valley and the Boulders. It is a place where the cold is absolute and the dark-sky preserve means the night is total. Inside Layla Rowan’s Spur End Estate, you have a seventy-two-degree fortress governed by an omniscient monitoring system called NILA, designed to log every heartbeat and timestamp every door latch.

I wanted to know what happens when human deceit is forced to navigate a system that literally cannot look away.

To tell that story, I needed a protagonist who understood systems just as intimately. Enter Cal Morrow, a retired forensic accountant who comes to the valley not to conquer it, but to sit quietly on his regular stool at the Casino and be left alone.

While writing Cal's journey, I made a discovery that completely shifted how I view the digital footprints we leave behind. Through Cal’s eyes, I realized that a perfect record is not proof of perfection. It is often a confession. Real life is inherently messy. It is full of transposed digits, calendar variances, and human friction. When an alibi, a ledger, or a security log looks entirely seamless, it is usually because it was meticulously constructed to look that way.

Writing this book taught me that the truth rarely lives in the data itself. It lives in the seams. These are the tiny, overlooked gaps where the data goes dark for just four minutes and fourteen seconds.

Almost Enough is a Tech-Noir mystery about the things we build to keep ourselves safe, and the exact moments those systems fail us. If you enjoy a slow-burn puzzle, a locked-room mystery, and a heavy dose of mountain-town atmosphere, I invite you to step inside the Spur End Estate.

Just remember that the house is always logging.