About Chris Weiss

I’m a patent attorney. The job is professional secret-keeping. People bring me something they have been building, and I help them protect it. It turns out that is not bad training for writing a thriller.

The Book

The Last Bites is a culinary thriller I’m writing now. A chef named Ella, whose career came apart a year before the restaurant she built won its star, is cooking in an unremarkable steakhouse when a warden calls: a man on death row has requested a last meal, and the dish he named is hers. She has five days, a kitchen that cannot make it, and no idea how this man seems to know so much about her while she knows nothing about him.

It started as a thought experiment. Nearly every chef I’ve read or listened to says a version of the same thing: that the food is not about them, it’s about the end result, it’s about the person eating it. That sounds humble right up until it goes somewhere uncomfortable. If the meal belongs to the recipient, does a terrible person deserve a terrible meal? Who decides? And what happens to a cook when fate hands her someone whose last bite could be their own creation?

The book is not finished. I’m writing it in public here, which is either brave or a commitment device. The first three chapters are free.

The Apps

I also vibe code iPhone apps on the weekends. There are five of them, they’re free, and they share one rule: no accounts, no ads, no analytics, and no server that ever sees your data. Everything lives on your device and in your own iCloud.

I spend my working life around confidentiality, and I find it strange that the price of a flashlight app is usually your data being sold to some unscrupulous third party.

The apps also relate, in one way or another, to the same themes as the book: the past that catches up with you, the people you assume you know, and the meals you make for everyone except yourself. Have a look.

The Rest

I live in Denver with my wife Thea and an English Cream longhaired dachshund named Das, who has his own opinions about the kitchen (mostly that I should drop food more and pick it up less).

I did not train as a chef. I have read far too many kitchen memoirs (and by memoirs, I mean YouTube videos), and I have spent longer than is reasonable reading about death row last meals, molecular gastronomy equipment, and kitchen conventions. Most of that research did not fit in the novel, so it ended up in the guides.

You can reach me at chris@insearchofacity.com. I answer.