Although some might see accounting as a tedious profession, a local retired CPA turned author found excitement between the numbers.
“During my career, a lot of people thought being an accountant was a boring subject, but I wasn’t that way. I had an exciting career and I enjoyed the heck out of it,” said Don VanLandingham, who drew from 40 years in the field when writing his latest novel, Corruptacy.
‘You’ve got to have a lot of imagination’
At the forefront of the novel is Jeffrey Cordell Allan, a young forensic accountant with the Executive Office of United States Trustees (EOUST). Allan starts out on a seemingly routine assignment, but soon finds himself unraveling a far-reaching web of crime and corruption.
VanLandingham described the novel as “ a lesson in how bankruptcy does, and doesn’t work in the United States.” Some events in the book actually happened to VanLandingham during his career, much of which found him working out of Rome and Atlanta.
“There some things that happen in the book that never happened to me, but a lot of it did,” he said. “In the first chapter, when Jeffrey is headed to the airport and a boulder comes crashing through the windshield, that really happened to me. It was on I-75 between Cartersville and Acworth.”
VanLandingham said he held the position of Chapter 13 Trustee for several years, and worked closely with the EOUST, a division of the Department of Justice that oversees bankruptcy cases.
“I was not an employee (of the EOUST), but I was a paid contractor. I had been the Chapter 13 Trustee in Rome, and there was a big brouhaha that happened in Atlanta. The judges there got really nervous and said we’ve got to bring everything in house, and they did. When that happened, the head of the executive office contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in traveling and doing some work for them. They had a number of cases that needed to be looked at. The very first one I had was that case in Maine,” he said, referring to an assignment that gets the ball rolling for Allan in Corruptacy.
Forensic accounting often involves trying to uncover some type of fraud or wrongdoing, and, in attempting to do that, “you’ve got to have a lot of imagination,” VanLandingham said.
“Trying to see if the person is accountable is the name of the game. You kind of have to think how a crook thinks,” he explained. “There’s a lot of forensic accounting that doesn’t involve bad guys, but a lot of it does. A lot of it is monotonous work because it’s piecing together bits and pieces of information the perpetrator didn’t want you to find.”
By piecing together details of multiple cases, Allan begins to uncover a criminal plot involving high-ranking government officials with ties to a terrorist organization.
He’s aided in the investigation by an FBI ally, “Fast” Eddie Cruise. VanLandingham said that character was inspired by a real San Francisco FBI agent with whom he once worked.
“He was actually known as ‘Fast’ Eddie, and was a delightful young man. He was quite a bit younger than me, but he was a buddy,” he added. “I’d just gotten back from San Francisco in 1989 when the earthquake happened. A few months after that, I was asked to go out there again for another case. While I’m out there, what happens but the Oakland Fire.”
When asked if there’s any of himself in the doggedly persistent Allan, VanLandingham said, “Jeffrey has some weaknesses and I had some weaknesses, some of which are displayed in the book. Some of his very good points, I wish I’d had as a younger man. I think I have those attributes now, but didn’t back when I was his age.”
Productive pandemic project
VanLandingham said Corruptacy took shape as the COVID-19 pandemic set in last year. By the end of 2020, he’d finished writing the book which was released in May of this year.
“I’d been thinking about it for several years, but I always found something else to do. Then, with the pandemic, whats a guy to do when he can’t go anywhere? Sit down and write a book! That’s what I did,” he said.
There’s a fair amount of accounting lingo sprinkled throughout the novel, but VanLandingham keeps the terminology easy to understand, always using it to further the story. He thanked his friends, Leland and Margie Fay, for making suggestions that helped develop the book’s characters.
“They added meat to the bones of some of the characters and did a really fine job of that. If this book is successful, I owe a lot to them,” he said.
VanLandingham’s father was an FBI agent who worked as an assistant to J. Edgar Hoover and as a private investigator. An actual case worked by his dad that involved the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., served as the basis for VanLandingham’s first novel, Drawn Into Hell.
“NBC News hired my dad because the sheriff and the deputy sheriff in Philadelphia, Miss., were suing NBC because of what they called malicious lying. They didn’t lie, as it turned out, and they hired him to conduct an investigation into the murders and find out what he could about the personalities of the sheriff and deputy sheriff,” VanLandingham said.
“I tried to be honest in my first book, and I tried to use that same honesty in writing this one,” he added.
Corruptacy can be found at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, among other online book retailers.
VanLandingham said he’s already working on a sequel, and there will be a small-town flavor to that book. It will also feature the character of Jeffrey Allan, he noted.
“I’ve been told by at least two writers if you have a character in the book that you like and that people like, use that character again,” he said.