BOARDROOM TO BACK ALLEY: THE MAKING OF A THRILLER WRITER
DC Leonard didn't invent the world of Harry Burgh. He spent twenty-five years inside a version of it.
Before the first pages of Descent and The Lindberg Discovery were ever written, Leonard built a career in executive strategy and marketing running high-stakes engagements across Canada, the U.S., the UK, and Europe. It's a career spent in boardrooms rather than back alleys, but the instincts turn out to be the same ones his protagonist relies on: reading a room before anyone speaks, spotting the deal that doesn't add up, knowing that the real risk is rarely the one written into the contract.
That's not a coincidence. It's the reason Harry Burgh is a risk consultant rather than a spy, a soldier or a cop. Leonard didn't need to invent a profession that could plausibly stumble into international conspiracy. He'd spent decades living adjacent to one. Corporate strategy, at the level Leonard practiced it, means learning to see the quiet architecture behind a decision: who benefits, what's being protected, and what's being deliberately left out of the room. It's a discipline built on discretion, on reading incentives, on understanding that institutions rarely announce their true intentions.
Those are also the exact tools a thriller needs.
What Leonard brings to the page isn't secondhand research... It's lived texture. The pressure of high finance. The particular loneliness of international travel for work. The way ambition and compromise can blur together inside an institution until no one quite remembers where the line was. When Harry Burgh walks into a client meeting that turns out to be something else entirely, or realizes that a routine audit has exposed something no one wanted found, that unease is drawn from a career spent watching how corporations actually behave under pressure, not how they claim to.
The result is a series grounded less in espionage tropes and more in something closer to home: the quiet, plausible corruption of ordinary institutions, and the very ordinary people who end up having to expose it.
DC Leonard lives in London, Ontario, and is still, by both instinct and habit, reading the room.