When the Crime Is on the Books. Why Fraud Makes Great Fiction.
Not every mystery begins with a body in an alley. Some start with a balance sheet.
Because of my own background, Certified Fraud Examiner, Fellow Chartered Professional Accountant, and former Trustee in Bankruptcy, I’ve always been drawn to stories that live in the margins of money and morality. The ones where the crimes don’t explode, they unfold. Where villains don’t brandish weapons, they manipulate numbers.
That’s the world Hamilton St. James inhabits. A Harvard MBA turned private investigator, he’s as comfortable in a boardroom as he is at a crime scene. His cases don’t just involve stolen goods or hidden motives; they deal with embezzlement, insider trading, offshore accounts, and the quiet kind of corruption that thrives in systems meant to protect us. In short, Hamilton solves the kinds of crimes that most people don’t realize are crimes until it’s too late.
Fraud-based mysteries operate differently from traditional whodunits. At their core, they’re about deceit, but not the kind driven by jealousy or revenge. These are stories of manipulation on a grand scale: financial deceit, white-collar crime, and institutional betrayal. The enemy isn’t always a single person; often it’s a culture, a corporation, or a system built on trust and designed for exploitation.
Where general mysteries might open with a murder weapon or a cryptic clue, fraud-based stories begin with something quieter: a discrepancy, an irregularity, a signature that doesn’t look quite right. The protagonist isn’t always a detective or an amateur sleuth but can be an analytical thinker, forensic accountant, journalist, investigator, or whistleblower, someone trained to notice what doesn’t add up.
The tension is different, too. The suspense builds as the truth closes in, through financial records, emails, and digital breadcrumbs. Fraud stories are often slow burns, the kind that reward attention and insight rather than instinct. The payoff comes when a pattern finally emerges and the mask of respectability slips.
The settings reflect that same world of control and ambition: banks, boardrooms, government offices, and the quiet corridors of power. The antagonists tend to be sophisticated, executives, lawyers, auditors, insiders; people who know how to hide in plain sight. Their weapons are influence and information.
And the themes? They cut deep. These stories explore truth versus illusion, moral compromise, and the cost of ambition. They remind us that the most dangerous crimes don’t always happen in dark alleys but behind glass walls, under fluorescent light.
Writers like John Grisham, Michael Connelly, and even Michael Lewis (in nonfiction form) have shown how compelling financial deception can be. The Firm, The Lincoln Lawyer, and The Big Short all reveal how greed, betrayal, and systems of power collide. In each, the mystery isn’t just about who committed the crime, but how, and how far they’ll go to keep it hidden.
For readers, that’s the thrill. Fraud-based mysteries demand engagement. They invite you to piece together the evidence, to question what you think you know. And for writers like me, they offer endless territory to explore, because wherever there’s money, there’s motive.
In Hamilton St. James’s world, the truth is rarely black and white. It’s written in contracts, coded in emails, and buried in the fine print, waiting for someone patient enough and brave enough to uncover it.
- Peter Cleveland
In Shadows of Deceit, Hamilton St. James takes on his most personal investigation yet, one that exposes a criminal network built on fake deeds and cold-blooded ambition. When the trail leads from paradise to peril, even the numbers start to bleed.
