The Accidental Out-of-Office Ghostwriter
A Novel of Corporate Deception and Tropical Lies

About this book:

Julian Mercer writes the kind of corporate fiction that sells luxury ball bearings and artisanal oat milk—until a desperate director slips him two hundred dollars to craft an out-of-office reply so terrifyingly specific (lithium pans, solar-assisted terrain vehicles, an eighty-dollar marine dispatch fee) that even the company's most predatory VP backs down. Word spreads. Soon Julian is running a shadow consultancy from his cubicle: spray-tanning executives to simulate North Atlantic windburn, forging ancestral land disputes in the Outer Hebrides, and engineering alibis so legally radioactive that HR treats them like unexploded ordnance. Business is booming. Then the Vice President of Global Strategy drops three thousand dollars on his desk and asks him to make her disappear from a mandatory board retreat in Scottsdale—without the Board daring to ask why.

Sharp, cynical, and wildly entertaining, *The Accidental Out-of-Office Ghostwriter* is *Office Space* meets *The Firm* for the burnout generation. Julian's schemes escalate from clever copywriting to full-blown operational theater, complete with physical evidence kits, encrypted messaging apps, and a growing roster of clients who would rather fake a geological expedition in the Atacama than sit through another trust-building exercise. But as the lies grow more elaborate and the clients more powerful, the line between helping people reclaim their lives and becoming the very machine he's subverting begins to blur—especially when the most dangerous person in the building decides she needs his services most of all.

A debut novel that turns the mundane horror of corporate performativity into a high-stakes caper, where the ultimate heist isn't money or data—it's your own time.