- Bestseller
- New Arrival
Behind the Zero
Topic: Interview of Billionaire
$5.99
Read for free with Aureum Premium
$9.99/month · Cancel anytime after 3 months
Short Description:
When Priya Ansari, a pension fund analyst, spots a six-hundred-forty-million-dollar loss dated before the deal behind it existed, she hires forensic accountant Ethan Cole to check the date. What they find reaches well beyond billionaire Damian Roth’s celebrated “zero-tax” claim, into shell companies, forged paper trails, and a firm that sells fraud as a service. This financial thriller asks what happens when a footnote threatens a myth, and who pays for the truth.
Book Details
Pages
98
Language
English
Published
October 2026
Publisher
amacox
ISBN
Book Details:
Damian Roth built an empire on one number: zero. Zero dollars in federal tax, declared onstage to a room leaning in for every word, sold as proof he simply understood the system better than anyone else. Two thousand miles away, a pension fund analyst named Priya Ansari watches the same broadcast and notices what nobody else has: a date that doesn’t add up. That one bad date pulls in Ethan Cole, a forensic accountant who once left a prestigious firm rather than let a client’s convenience soften his findings. What starts as a six-week diligence job becomes a hunt through backdated contracts, shell companies stacked across three jurisdictions, and a paper trail built to survive exactly this kind of scrutiny. The deeper Ethan and his team dig, the clearer it becomes that Roth’s zero was never really his — it was manufactured and sold to him, like any other service, by someone who has spent a decade making sure her own name touches nothing.
As a reporter chases the same story from another angle, and witnesses start vanishing or going quiet, the investigation grows from one man’s tax bill into something far larger, and far more dangerous to expose. Behind the Zero is a sharp, character-driven financial thriller about the gap between what’s legal and what’s true — and about the people who refuse to look away, even after everyone else decides a number is close enough. Some stories start with a headline. This one starts with a date that doesn’t work, and never lets go.
About the author
Meet Samuel Crestwood
Samuel Crestwood writes financial and corporate thrillers grounded in the real mechanics of forensic accounting, corporate structuring, and white-collar investigation. His fiction begins with a simple conviction: the most gripping mysteries are often hidden in plain sight, inside a footnote, a mismatched date, or a number that is almost right. Before turning to fiction, Samuel spent years around the world of finance, where he learned how money moves, how it hides, and how much depends on people willing to ask an uncomfortable question at the worst possible moment. That curiosity, and a lasting respect for those who check the numbers when no one else will, shapes every story he tells.
His novels pair meticulous attention to detail with fast, character-driven storytelling. Readers will find no cartoon villains and no easy heroes, only ordinary professionals, such as auditors, analysts, reporters, and compliance officers, whose stubborn integrity puts them at odds with powerful institutions. Samuel is drawn to the gap between what the law technically allows and what any reasonable person would call fair. Behind the Zero: The Zero-Tax Myth is his latest novel. It follows forensic accountant Ethan Cole as a single impossible date unravels a hidden industry built on manufactured losses. Samuel writes for readers who enjoy intelligent suspense and who believe a number should never be accepted simply because it is convenient. He lives and writes quietly, away from the spotlight, and is at work on his next investigation.
