Where it all begins...
1982. Before Harry Burgh knew the name Smyth, an entire war had already been fought in the shadows.
Long before Evergreen Consulting stepped into the spotlight, the arms moved quietly through EuroTrade's ledgers, deals structured to look like nothing at all, decisions made by men who never touched the merchandise themselves.
This is the story of how that machine was built, and the man it built along the way.
Descent traces the making of an antagonist: the compromises, the recruitments, the quiet Congo connections that would echo for years. It's a story about how ordinary ambition curdles into something colder and how ambition painted into a corner would set events in motion that no one could have predicted.
A discovery with deadly consequences...
London, 1986. A body in the fog. A name that shouldn't exist.
Harry Burgh has built a career reading risk for other people's money, trained to spot the fault line before it cracks.
But when a colleague turns up dead and a name from a decades-old file resurfaces, the fault line runs straight through his own firm.
The trail moves from the boardrooms of London to the docks of Rotterdam and the cold industrial edges of Hamburg, where a man calling himself Ralf Lindberg is not who his file says he is.
As Scotland Yard circles and old loyalties are tested, Harry discovers that some deals from the Cold War's quiet corners were never meant to be found and that finding them might cost him everything.
About DC Leonard
Author of the Harry Burgh Corporate Thriller Series
DC Leonard is the pen name of Dave Cliche, a corporate strategist turned thriller writer.
For over twenty-five years, Dave built a career in executive marketing and strategy, running high-stakes engagements across Canada, the U.S., the UK, and Europe, and mastering the quiet tradecraft of corporate discovery long before he ever put it on the page.
That career gave him a front-row seat to boardrooms, high finance, and the kind of institutional pressure where the line between ambition and corruption can blur fast.
Writing as DC Leonard, he channels that world into fiction, following risk consultant Harry Burgh through international conspiracies where the real threat is rarely the one on the surface.
He lives in London, Ontario, Canada, and is happiest when a story or a trip takes him within sight of the ocean.
