Guardian Angel expands upon something I wrote back in 1997. I have always been interested in how regular people are affected by the big events around them. In my opinion, what happens to them are the real, interesting stories. During the Clinton saga, I was especially interested in the dilemma the Secret Service agents that were called to testify faced.

At that same time, I was in an innovative creative writing class with my daughter—a unique chance for parent and child to bond once a week. For my weekly assignment I wrote an article about the dilemma faced by a Secret Service agent when called to testify against the President. When I presented my article, the feedback in the class was very good. I was between work assignments and found that I very much enjoyed the class and the challenge of writing. Having majored in journalism, I had the opportunity to write in my business career, but had never had the opportunity to write fiction creatively (although some who read my business proposals might disagree with that).

The more I thought about the Secret Service agent scenario, the more I felt like I would like to expand on what I had written. What would happen to someone faced with a decision of personal ethics vs. loyalty to a cause?

During my business career, I had often come across ethical questions and dilemmas. Luckily, I worked for a very upstanding and ethically aware corporation—but in dealing with a cross-section of customers, suppliers, media, agencies, competitors and fellow businessmen, I had come across several opportunities to observe both questionable ethical decisions and quandaries, as well as internal and external relationship issues between the sexes.

As I watched politicians get more and more mired into competition based on the amount of money they raised, I saw many parallels to the business world and some situations that were dissimilar. For instance, some of the behavior of politicians in treating interns and employees poorly went unchallenged in many cases, whereas in many business settings it would be dealt with severely (not all, but many).

There was also the opportunity to watch the issue of political correctness in the business environment. I could see companies try to do the right thing and wind up going overboard in creating an environment that was artificial and completely uncomfortable for its employees. The times and the rules in the corporate world and the business world were confusing and seemed incongruous and rife with contradictions.

Guardian Angel was somewhat of a catharsis for me. I was able to project what might happen to a powerful politician who did not keep his eye on the ball, and was also able to portray some of the corporate greed and inconsistencies I had witnessed in my corporate career. While I never saw murder or outright kidnapping, or anything like that…I believe that many of the more serious corporate crimes are a consequence of an incremental creep of ethics. People would do and get away with something and then feel empowered to do and get away with more. In the book, they just kept going.

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