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CLEAN HANDS: A GUS ROURKE NOVEL, Book One of the Calder County Novels
David H. Tolly’s Clean Hands is a conspiracy-tinged crime novel built around a sharp premise: philanthropist Eleanor Grant is murdered during a gala at her own estate, while two hundred influential guests are close enough to witness everything and somehow see nothing. Detective Gus Rourke quickly recognizes that the apparent burglary is a carefully staged story, and the investigation leads from a missing manuscript and a hidden memory card to a century-old network that turns dirty money, political influence, and violence into respectable philanthropy. The financial trail is unusually important here. Charities, trusts, consulting payments, leases, and donor-advised funds aren’t just background details. They’re the machinery of the mystery, and Tolly explains them clearly enough that the reader can follow the money without feeling trapped in an accounting seminar.
Rourke is the novel’s strongest anchor. He’s a colorblind detective who trusts shapes more than colors, paper more than screens, and patient observation more than an easy explanation. His numbered rules at the beginning of each chapter give the book a sturdy procedural rhythm while revealing the personal losses behind his methods. He’s joined by an appealing team, especially his tech-minded partner Olivia Hayes, financial investigator June “Sparrow” Okafor, medical examiner Eliza Martin, and his journalist daughter, Casey. Their different skills keep the investigation moving, but their personal connections to the case give it weight. The most affecting parts often involve parents and children, including Eleanor and her estranged daughter Lily, Rourke and Casey, and the frightened mother who becomes a weapon in someone else’s plan.
Readers of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will recognize the appeal of a stubborn investigator following evidence into rooms where powerful people expect obedience. Like Bosch, Rourke is guided by a private moral code and has little patience for institutions that value calm appearances over inconvenient truth. Tolly’s novel, though, is more openly focused on financial systems and inherited influence. Its villain is larger than a single murderer. The real adversary is a culture in which respectable people pass responsibility downward until nobody at the top appears to have touched the crime. That gives Clean Hands some of the institutional sweep of a John Grisham thriller, while its crime-scene work and damaged detective place it firmly in the police procedural tradition.
The novel moves quickly through short chapters, shifting viewpoints and frequent discoveries, and Tolly has a knack for ending scenes on lines that pull the reader forward. The book delivers a satisfying resolution to Eleanor’s murder while leaving the wider conflict alive. Clean Hands works as a complete mystery, but its final pages also make Gus Rourke’s next investigation feel like a natural continuation of a fight he’s only begun to understand.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0H7FTJHS5
Weapons Deployed
Black and White Smoke follows a CFO who is trying desperately to navigate his company through a dangerous period after the founder disappears from active leadership. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve always found power and leadership transitions, including CEO succession battles, to be riveting. Especially so when the eventual outcome is the least expected one. Several shows, including the Succession series and, perhaps oddly for a business fiction book, the intrigues behind the election of popes, including the incumbent, served as inspiration.
The novel treats boardrooms like battlefields. Was that a conscious decision from the start?
Indeed, that’s the crux of the protagonist, Jon’s plotline, where analogies to chess battles are often drawn. On the chessboard, having attacking momentum, ensuring the strategic placement of pieces on the right squares, and seeking material advantages are the keys to victory.
Similarly, in the boardroom, the weapons deployed are timing, the power of persuasion, novelty of ideas, and the ability to forge potent alliances, be they collaborative or nefarious in nature. In these settings, subtext and subtlety are key features of the verbal duels. That’s what I intended to showcase in the novel.
Which character surprised you the most while writing?
Paxton, who is one of the antagonists. Ordinarily, I’d have little time for a character like him- a boisterous blowhard. However, my admiration of his qualities and understanding of the motivation for his choices increased multi-fold as I developed his character arc.
What do you think today’s business leaders could take away from the novel?
The essentials for success at the top echelons of organizations, such as having outstanding communication skills, strategic vision, a nose for opportunity, bias for action, drive, resilience, and ruthlessness, are on full display among the book’s characters. The book also doesn’t shy away from highlighting the personal costs of scaling the totem pole. All said and done, a central message is that forging the right alliances and who you have in your corner make a difference.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Threats are mounting against an innovative business intelligence firm. Its CFO, Jon Kiza, a behind-the-scenes operator, hasn’t been in the spotlight. But when the CEO vanishes, and a game-changing deal starts unraveling, he’s thrust into an unexpected race for the top job -where he faces Paxton Stump, the firm’s charismatic rainmaker. Guile and patient positioning are pitted against charm and flamboyant thrusts. It’s a duel between the chess-minded quant and the warrior poet.
While on a trip, Jon is put in the crosshairs of alluring forces he didn’t see coming. A smear campaign takes shape, and he realizes that far more dangerous threats lurk in the shadows. Cornered, he fights back. Meanwhile, Paxton bags a game-changing deal with a client prospect, but obstacles follow, and the goal posts keep shifting. Regardless, the bacon winner won’t be stopped.
Of the two, who will sway the board?
Set across multiple cities, Black and White Smoke is an international, fast-paced corporate thriller packed with boardroom intrigue, spiced with corporate espionage, and with characters diced by unchecked greed.
In this world, every tidbit of information is leverage. And every choice has consequences.
Black and White Smoke – C-Suite Woes: Subtlety Has Limits
Black and White Smoke, by Thomas V. Papa, is a corporate thriller with its feet planted firmly in boardrooms, investor meetings, private jets, cocktail bars, and the quiet corners where reputations are made or ruined. The book opens with a regulatory fight over credit rating agencies and quickly widens into a story about money, control, succession, and the people willing to bend or break the rules to get ahead. Its early mantra, “Evidence, evidence, evidence,” captures the world of the novel well: everyone claims to be guided by facts, but almost everyone is also chasing power.
At the center is Jon Kiza, VASPI’s CFO, who’s trying to steer the company through a dangerous period after founder Vlad Fabiano disappears from active leadership. Jon’s rival, Paxton Stump, is louder, flashier, and more naturally theatrical, while Tessy Hill has to hold the company together from the board chair’s seat. Around them, Abe Quinn and Krenith bring a more predatory energy to the story, turning what could’ve been a corporate succession drama into something closer to a chess match with surveillance, planted scandals, hostile media, and real physical danger.
What makes the book so engaging is how seriously it takes corporate life as a battlefield. Papa doesn’t treat finance, acquisitions, data, or board politics as background noise. They’re the machinery of the plot. The scenes work best when the characters are sparring across a table, testing each other’s weaknesses, or trying to read what isn’t being said. Jon is especially compelling because he isn’t a smooth superhero type. He’s smart, proud, bruised, and sometimes cornered, which makes his fight to survive feel personal as well as professional.
The writing has a brisk, slightly satirical edge, with plenty of sharp internal commentary and personality packed into the dialogue. Paxton’s bluster, Dreyfuss’s bluntness, Quinn’s menace, and Jon’s controlled irritation all give the book texture. The plot is busy, sometimes deliberately crowded, but that fits a story about a sector being reshaped by deregulation, ambition, and backroom pressure. The line “Subtlety has limits” feels like the book’s operating principle: polite corporate language keeps giving way to harder tactics.
Black and White Smoke is a smart and energetic corporate thriller about who gets to lead when a company is under siege. It blends boardroom maneuvering with espionage-style tension, while keeping its focus on character, loyalty, ego, and judgment under pressure. Readers who enjoy high-stakes business fiction, succession battles, and stories where the real weapons are information and leverage will find plenty to chew on here.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0GQ1X71NF
The Price Tag
Hold On for Dear Life follows three MIT friends who turn a crypto idea into a company and are forced to live with the consequences of their success. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration was something I witnessed and something I felt myself.
I spent twenty-five years in institutional finance, with the last decade inside the digital asset and blockchain world. I was in the rooms during the 2017 crypto boom. The ICO pitches and launches, the treasury meetings, the conference stages, the conversations that happened when the market stopped agreeing with you. I looked at the situation from a different angle than these founders because I had market experience.
The thing that stayed with me that no article or non-fiction account ever captured correctly was the idealism. These were not grifters or speculators. It wasn’t about getting rich quick for the true founders. They were people who believed, with real conviction, that they were changing how money works. And they were right about the technology. They were people who had looked at a financial system and wanted it focused on people, not institutions. The system that charges a week’s worth of groceries to send money across a border, and they said, “we can fix this”. The belief was genuine. The mission was real.
What they hadn’t reckoned with was the cost of being right in a world that was moving much faster than anyone’s wisdom could keep pace with.
What the novel is actually about is what happens to people who believe something genuinely important when the world gives them more success than they were ready for. The gap between the conviction and the capacity to hold it is where the interesting human material lives. I needed fiction to tell that story. No other form could get inside it the way a novel can.
Charlie, Jack, and Nik each represent very different strengths. How did these characters develop?
Before I outlined the storyline, I developed the characters — because they are the story. The plot is what happens to them. The characters are what the book is about.
I started with three relationships to ambition because I had observed three distinct versions of it in the real world.
There is the ambition that is genuinely mission-driven. That wants to build something true and is vulnerable to the world that surrounds the building. The person who believes so completely in what they are creating that they don’t see the version of themselves being slowly shaped by the world, the mission requires them to inhabit.
There is the ambition that is architectural. That is Precise, invisible, load-bearing, and deeply personal about what it will and won’t sacrifice. The person who builds the thing that makes everything else work and pays the price of that in ways nobody around them fully sees.
And there is the ambition that is performed. That has learned to be the most compelling person in every room and has, over time, confused the performance for the self.
Charlie began as the mission. Jack began as the architecture. Nik began as the energy. And together they made the kind of team that can raise thirty million dollars in a single night because you need all three. You need the person who means it, the person who builds it, and the person who makes the world believe in it.
The novel is the story of what each of those strengths costs. The price tag. Charlie’s mission makes him vulnerable to visibility. Jack’s precision makes her carry things in silence. Nik’s performance makes him, eventually, unable to find himself underneath it.
I started with three strengths. The story arrived when I started asking what each strength was quietly destroying.
What role does fear play in shaping the founders’ decisions once the company becomes successful?
The specific fear I was most interested in writing is the kind that arrives with success rather than before it.
Before the ICO launch, the fears are obvious. Will it work? Will anyone believe in it? Will the technology hold? Those fears are clean and navigable. They have a shape.
The fears that arrive after success are stranger. They are the fears of people who have gotten what they wanted and are now terrified of losing it or of being revealed as somehow unworthy of it. And those fears do not announce themselves as fear. They arrive dressed as decision-making.
Nik’s 3 AM trade is the clearest example. He is not greedy. He is afraid of being the person in the room who failed to find the shortcut that everyone assumed he would find. So he calls the trade a hedge. He calls it runway. He calls it responsible treasury management. And in the specific logic of 3 AM, it is all of those things.
He sleeps fine afterward. That is the most frightening detail in the book. Because it tells you how completely the fear has disguised itself as certainty.
Charlie’s fear operates differently. It comes more slowly, more quietly, more insidiously. He is afraid of losing the thing he believes in most, which is the mission. And the way that fear manifests is in the opposite of what you might expect. Instead of protecting the mission, he starts protecting the version of himself that the world has built around the mission. The panels, the press, and the conference stages are not vanity. They are Charlie’s attempt to stay close to the thing he cares about. But the version of Charlie that the world is rewarding is not quite the version that wrote the whitepaper’s first line. The fear of acknowledging that gap of looking directly at the distance between who he was and who he is becoming is what keeps him from correcting it.
Jack’s fear is the most interior and the most precisely controlled. She is afraid of exactly one thing, of losing what they already have, and she manages that fear with a discipline so complete that she has turned it into a virtue. The not-actionable file. The thirty seconds in the bathroom. The voice that does not waver. All of it is fear, managed with extraordinary precision. The novel asks whether that precision is wisdom or avoidance. I genuinely do not know the answer. I think both things are true simultaneously.
What I hoped to do with all three of them is show that the fears that matter most in this story are not the fears before success. They are the fears that success creates. The fear of being exposed as unworthy. The fear of losing the self that started the thing. The fear of saying out loud the thing that might change everything. Those are the fears that make the decisions. And those are the fears that none of them at the time would have called fear at all.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
My first book, published with Wiley, From Hoodies to Suits: Innovating Digital Assets for Traditional Finance is available. It is a non-fiction industry primer. I’m excited for the idea of my next novel, which hasn’t come to me yet.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Three friends. One impossible idea. Thirty million dollars raised overnight. And a question none of them thought to ask until it was almost too late.
In the summer of 2017, Charlie, Jack, and Nik leave MIT believing they can change how the world moves money. Within months, they are exactly the kind of company that gets written about. Within two years, they are nearly destroyed by it.
A Story About Everything That Almost Broke
Hold On for Dear Life is a literary fiction novel about idealism, hubris, and resilience – and the long, difficult work of finding your way back to why you started.
What waits inside:
A friendship that almost doesn’t survive success
A love story three years in the making
A market crash, a hack, a kidnapping
A debut novel by a real Wall Street and crypto executive
Have you ever bet on something the world told you to walk away from?
Have you ever built something with the people closest to you and watched the building change them?
This isn’t a book about cryptocurrency.
It’s a book about what survives when everything else burns – and what it costs to find out.
Among the best literary fiction books written at the intersection of ambition, friendship, and financial ruin – this is fiction for adults who know that the hardest losses aren’t always measured in money.
If Normal People stayed with you, if Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow lingered for weeks, this is the next book you cannot put down.
Neutrality Act
The Consulting Agent: Neutrality Act, by Jonathan M. Bryant, is a historical noir crime and espionage novel set in Atlanta in 1939, just before the world tips fully into war. The story follows Mark Morgan, a damaged former corporate fixer turned consulting agent, as he is hired to keep watch over German delegates attending the Baptist World Alliance meeting. What begins as a protective job quickly pulls him into Nazi politics, local corruption, murder, police violence, and the uneasy question of what neutrality means when evil is standing right in front of you.
What I appreciated most about this book is how lived-in it feels. Bryant gives Atlanta texture: the heat, the class divisions, the racial lines, the clubs, the trolleys, the old buildings, the stink of streets that have not recovered from hard times. The city is not just a backdrop. It presses on Mark from every side. The noir genre works well here because Mark is bruised in all the ways a noir lead should be, but he’s not a cartoon of cynicism. He’s weary, proud, scared, impulsive, and often slower to understand people than he thinks he is. That made him interesting to follow. I did not always admire him, but I believed him.
The author also makes a smart choice by tying the mystery to real historical tension rather than treating history like decoration. The Baptist World Alliance, Nazi delegates, American isolationism, antisemitism, segregation, and the coming war all sit under the plot like a low rumble. Sometimes the book is a detective story, sometimes an espionage tale, and sometimes a character study about a man trying to decide what kind of person he still is. I liked that the title keeps echoing through the story. Neutrality is not presented as clean or noble. It starts to feel like a thin coat of paint over fear, self-interest, and exhaustion. That is where the novel has its sharpest edge.
I would recommend The Consulting Agent: Neutrality Act to readers who enjoy historical fiction with crime, espionage, and moral tension woven together. Fans of noir mysteries, prewar spy fiction, and character-driven detective stories will get the most out of it, especially if they like books that care as much about atmosphere and history as they do about plot. It’s thoughtful, gritty, and grounded, with enough danger to keep the pages moving and enough unease to linger after the last chapter.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0GHVRDKHW
Hold On for Dear Life
Hold On for Dear Life, by Annelise Osborne, is a startup novel about three MIT friends who turn a crypto idea into a company, then have to live with everything that success brings. Charlie is the technical visionary, Jack is the builder who keeps the system honest, and Nik is the magnetic operator who knows how to make people believe. Their company, Advantage, begins with a real ideal: to make financial systems faster, fairer, and easier for ordinary people to use. One of the book’s cleanest lines comes from Jack, who says, “The complexity has to be invisible.” That idea runs through the whole story, not just as product philosophy, but as a measure of what the characters are trying to do with their own lives.
What makes the book engaging is how closely it ties technology to people. The crypto world here isn’t just charts, tokens, conferences, and hype. It’s late nights in Williamsburg, awkward co-founder dinners, Telegram chaos, security audits, jealousy, ambition, and the strange intimacy of building something with people who know you too well. Osborne is especially good at showing how a company’s culture forms in small moments, like who stays late, who notices risk, who gets credit, and who quietly carries the weight no one else can see.
The novel also has a strong sense of momentum. The early chapters capture the rush of 2017 crypto idealism, when every meetup feels like a doorway, and every new user feels like proof. As Advantage grows, the story widens into a sharp look at visibility and its cost. Public attention becomes capital, then pressure, then danger. After the stakes rise, Jack’s explanation lands with chilling simplicity: “Because people are watching.” It’s a line that reframes the whole book, turning success from something shiny into something exposed.
The strongest character work belongs to the trio at the center. Charlie’s belief in systems, Jack’s discipline, and Nik’s hunger for recognition each feel tied to something deeper than plot mechanics. Their mistakes make sense because they grow naturally out of their gifts. Nik’s recklessness comes from the same drive that helps Advantage get noticed. Jack’s control is what saves the company, but it also keeps her feelings boxed away. Charlie’s idealism gives the story its heart, especially when the book shifts from trading infrastructure to a stablecoin built around real-world access and remittances.
By the end, Hold On for Dear Life becomes a story about what founders hold onto after the hype burns off. It’s about rebuilding with more humility, choosing steadiness over spectacle, and learning that contribution can matter more than winning the loudest room. The final part, centered on USDA and the promise of cheaper cross-border payments, gives the novel a satisfying sense of purpose. This is a thoughtful and relatable book about innovation, friendship, and the personal cost of trying to build something that actually works.
Pages: 415 | ASIN : B0GX3B63RM
Money, Loyalty, and Fear
Symphony of Lies follows an investigative journalist who is unexpectedly named in the will of a wealthy Monaco socialite tied to her past, pulling her into a glittering world of elite corruption, buried deaths, and dangerous truths. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The idea began with a question: what if an inheritance was not a gift, but an invitation into danger?
I was interested in the kind of power that does not announce itself loudly. Monaco, Switzerland, and the closed world of international wealth offered the right atmosphere for that: polished surfaces, beautiful rooms, discreet conversations, and secrets protected by money, loyalty, and fear. An investigative journalist seemed like the ideal character to enter that world because she understands how corruption works, but she is not outside it.
Emma Bally is drawn into the mystery because the past has selected her. The will becomes less a reward than a trap. That setup allowed me to explore how old debts, hidden deaths, and carefully managed reputations can shape lives long after the original events have been buried.
Emma is compelling because she isn’t morally pure. She’s exposed corruption, but she’s also benefited from the systems she critiques. Why was it important to make her ethically complicated?
Because a morally pure investigator would have made the story less honest.
Emma has exposed corruption, but she has also accepted the price of silence. That contradiction is central to who she is. She understands guilt not as an abstract idea, but as something practical and personal. She knows what it means to look away, to rationalize, and to survive within systems that reward discretion.
I wanted Emma to be capable, intelligent, and courageous, but also compromised. Her flaws make her more vulnerable to the truth because she cannot investigate others without confronting herself. In a world where almost everyone has something to hide, Emma’s own moral ambiguity makes the investigation more dangerous — and more intimate.
The novel repeatedly questions whether truth can remain pure once money and power begin shaping it. What drew you to that tension?
Truth is often treated as something simple: either hidden or revealed. But in powerful circles, truth is managed. It is delayed, softened, bought, reframed, or buried under more acceptable stories.
That tension interested me because money does not always need to destroy the truth openly. Sometimes it changes the conditions under which truth can survive. It decides who is believed, who is protected, who is dismissed, and what price must be paid for speaking.
In Symphony of Lies, truth is not only a moral question. It is also a currency, a weapon, and sometimes a liability. I wanted to explore what happens when a person who once compromised with silence is forced to decide whether the truth is still worth the cost.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I am currently working on the next Emma Bally novel, which continues the world introduced in Symphony of Lies. This time, Angela’s life is under threat, and Emma is forced to confront not only the danger surrounding her friend but also Nicole’s increasingly destructive influence on her own life.
The new book deepens the psychological and emotional stakes of the series while staying close to the atmosphere readers will recognize from Symphony of Lies: wealth, secrecy, moral compromise, and danger moving quietly beneath polished surfaces.
The book is planned for release by the end of the year.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Swiss investigative journalist Emma Bally has walked away from her career, seeking refuge in the quiet, snowy isolation of Gstaad. She is done exposing corruption, and she is done compromising her own ethics. But her carefully guarded exile shatters when she receives a registered letter from Monaco: An old acquaintance is dead.
Summoned to a highly orchestrated will reading, Emma discovers she has inherited a substantial amount of money from the Marianne Foundation. At first glance, it is a charitable organization. In reality, it is a philanthropic shell hiding a lethal, underground economy of surveillance, extreme discretion, and perfectly timed “accidents.”
To uncover the truth, Emma must leave her sanctuary and plunge into the glamorous, treacherous world of Europe’s elite. Alongside her psychologist friend Angela and her loyal dog Max, she begins to unravel a braided trail of doctored police files, convenient disappearances, and polite, professional violence.
As she navigates this lethal new world, Emma is forced to question shifting alliances, her mysterious benefactor, and the truth behind her own parents’ deaths. But as the list of missing witnesses grows, Emma must confront a terrifying question: to tear down a polished empire of evil, how far is she willing to compromise her own soul?
No more secrets. No more lies.
Symphony of Lies is a cerebral, slow-burn psychological thriller perfect for fans of Tana French, Lucy Foley, and stories of high-society suspense.
Unique Crimes
Better Off Dead follows an amateur sleuth who gets drawn into a case that is initially ruled an accidental swimming death, but a darker theory soon surfaces. Trisha notices social awkwardness and emotional cracks as much as clues. Why was that perspective important?
Trisha is just an ordinary person. She’s not a high-flying private investigator wearing designer clothes and shoes or a whip-smart police detective. Her mother dies while she’s in high school, and her father leaves, so she has to bring up her younger sister. Trisha’s dreams of further education go down the drain when her father walks out the door. But she is determined to keep her sister out of the “system” and focused on college. Although her intellectual education stops early, her natural street smarts become highly developed. She sees what most people miss. She’s innately intuitive, and she uses that ability to ask questions that nobody else wants to. With that instinctive capacity, coupled with her pushiness, she can solve some unique crimes.
The Barlow brothers have a deeply uneasy dynamic. Were you interested in rivalry, resentment, or something subtler?
The Barlow brothers grew up and worked in exclusive, rich Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. They were always competitive. Both liked money and what it could buy them. But Andy, the dead brother, lived in a fantasy world, which translated into living beyond his means. His unrealistic goals pushed him to gamble and put his shared financial advising business with his brother, his marriage, and his athletic targets at high risk. And the risks eventually killed him. Was the remaining brother overwhelmed with grief? It certainly doesn’t seem so.
Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Trisha and the direction of the next book?
Trisha is dusting off the day’s work at the San Francisco Giants ballpark with a walk at San Quentin Beach, right around a point of land from the infamous prison. She notices a white object floating at the tideline. As she approaches, the strange ball-like object comes into focus. It’s a skull. Within the following month, more body parts wash ashore at different beaches in Marin County: the skeletal hands of a child and the skeletal feet of an adult. What does the local paper say about the remains: not much. But Trisha is riveted when she learns that all three body parts are from different people and all were female.
The working title for book five is Dead and Gone.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Instagram | Bluesky | Website | Amazon
Trisha digs into the man’s history and finds fractured relationships in his family, his business and his marriage. There’s clearly more than one person who had reason to seek a deadly revenge, but would they go as far as murder?
