Originally published in Carroll Capital, the print publication of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Read the June 2026 issue here.
When Bob Ainsworth '75 retired in 2018 from his role as a controller for an information services company, he did his best to find something to fill his free time. He did some consulting, tried drumming—even learning “Uptown Funk”—but what finally stuck was becoming an author.
It was a big leap for Ainsworth, who had very little experience writing and spent much of his career making spreadsheets in auditing roles. But he loved crime series like Perry Mason and Ironside, and he also knew that people always got a kick out of the stories he told about discovering real financial crimes in his work. Ainsworth wondered if he could combine the two worlds.
Enter Harry Bartlett, a fictional former CFO turned fraud detective. Over the course of five self-published books so far (Conned, Duped, Scammed, Ponzi’d, and The Last Unindicted Mayor), Bartlett and a menagerie of other vivid characters work to solve financial crimes that take them from Nantucket Island to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and even to the doorstep of con artist Charles Ponzi.
Bartlett’s adventures are often more lurid than the actual schemes Ainsworth uncovered during his career, which included a secret supermarket cash register left off the books and someone padding the payroll at the former Wonderland dog track, but Ainsworth did give the character his same impulse to speak up about corruption.
Bob Ainsworth '75
“I had an interesting career and a lot of different experiences, and all of that has led to this. I just learned a lot,” he explains. Ainsworth credits Boston College for being where he really “learned to learn.” He recalls balancing his accounting concentration requirements with philosophy classes to expand his horizons. “It’s not always about the content,” he says. “It’s about exercising your brain, and how far you can stretch it.”
When it comes to imagining new plotlines for his novels, Ainsworth admits that coming up with the crimes is the easy part. “The hardest thing you have to do is finish the first draft,” he says. But at the end of the day, Ainsworth continues to write simply because it’s fun. “I’m never going to be John Grisham, but you know that saying, ‘dance like nobody’s watching’? I write like nobody’s going to read but me.”
