I sold real estate in early 1990s.ย That probably doesn’t sound like the opening of a crime novel, but it’s the truth โ and it’s where Alexandra Sinclair was born.
When you work in real estate, you live inside the deal. You watch power change hands across a table in someones diningroom. You see what people will do for a signature โ the charm, the pressure, the smiles that don’t reach the eyes.
That’s what fascinated me. Not the properties โ the people. As one early reader of my book put it: “It’s not about who owns the property. It’s about who owns the people.”
Every deal has a hidden agenda. Every relationship has a price. I didn’t have to invent that part. I watched it.
The crimes, though โ those are mine. Everything criminal in the Alexandra Sinclair series came out of my imagination. I took the world I knew โ the stress, the negotiations, the money moving just under the surface โ and I asked the question every crime writer asks: what if someone crossed the line?
What if the ruthless power games went one step further? What if the betrayal wasn’t just business?
That’s how *Signed, Sealed, Betrayed* happened. And then Alexandra wouldn’t let me go โ one book became a series, because in the corporate world, one exposed secret just leads to the next. *The Riverside Project*
Book 2 was created.
The betrayal in my books is quiet, and I think that’s what makes them so intriguing: the colleague smiling at you while planning a takeover. The deal that looks perfect until you read the fine print. The people who own everything except a conscience.
Corporate crime makes perfect thriller territory because the stakes are real and the weapons are invisible. Nobody needs a gun when they can ruin you with a signature. And the heroine who walks into that world and finds the truth? That’s Alexandra Sinclair โ and honestly, I think a lot of readers will be taken in by corruption she’s walking into as she grows and learns throughout her evolving career in corporate real estate.
I didn’t plan to become a fiction writer. I just spent years in real estate negotiations and one day I started writing down what would happen if someone acted unethically. And what if the stakes were at the highest levels of opulence and greed.
The rest was imagination.
Teresa Aker is the author of the Alexandra Sinclair corporate mystery series set in Toronto – Signed, Sealed, Betrayed and The Riverside Project, with book 3, The Silent Partner (Montreal), in progress. A former television professional said of the books: “Honestly, this has to be a series!” – “Think Mad Men meets the ruthless power games of Oil Man.” Also reviewed in The Wire Magazine (Peterborough).
