They almost got away with it.
A painting walks out the front door of the most famous museum in the world, and for more than a full day nobody notices it is gone. Sixty handwritten notebooks surface in West Germany, and a magazine pays a fortune for what it believes are the secret diaries of Adolf Hitler. Two girls in a Yorkshire village photograph fairies at the bottom of the garden, and the man who invented Sherlock Holmes takes their side.
Every one of these plans worked. For a while.
Then a gang hiding out in a farmhouse passed the time playing Monopoly — with the real money they had stolen. A scientist measured how much fluorine a bone had soaked up from the ground it was buried in. Someone held a page under an ultraviolet lamp and watched it glow.
How They Got Caught tells thirteen true stories from the last hundred and fifty years — heists, forgeries, spies, impostors and hoaxes — and every one turns on the same thing. Not the crime. The small, ordinary detail that nobody thought was worth worrying about, and that pulled a brilliant plan apart.
Everything in it is true. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement stays in the story. And along the way you will be asked what you think — always at a point where you already know enough to work it out.