Tom Markert has spent his career studying the systems most people never see until they fail.
A former global executive, CEO, consultant, public official, and cybersecurity leader, Markert has worked at the intersection of business, technology, leadership, and risk for decades.
His résumé includes senior roles with some of the world’s best-known companies, service as a city commissioner in Delray Beach, Florida, and leadership within InfraGard, the FBI-affiliated public-private partnership dedicated to protecting critical infrastructure.
Long before cybercrime became dinner-table conversation, Markert was paying attention to the hidden networks, human vulnerabilities, and digital dependencies reshaping modern life.
That experience now fuels his fiction.
With Death Watch, Markert introduced readers to a thriller world where technology, politics, intuition, and danger collide.
The novel’s success confirmed what early readers already sensed: Markert has a gift for turning the invisible architecture of modern threat into propulsive, cinematic suspense.
His stories move fast, but they are not built on fantasy alone. They are rooted in the unsettling truth that our most ordinary systems—phones, airports, financial platforms, social networks, security protocols—can become weapons when the wrong people understand them better than we do.
His upcoming thriller, Death Market, co-authored with Candi S. Cross, pushes that danger into darker territory.
A sought-after ghostwriter known for investigative depth, emotionally charged prose, and a rare ease with dark psychological material, Cross brings emotional precision and real-world urgency to a story that descends into the shadow economy of the dark web.
Exploring the predatory machinery of online fraud, romance scams, trafficking-linked scam centers, and digital predators, Death Market asks a chilling question: what happens when scams stop being only about stolen money and become a marketplace for human outcomes?
In Markert’s fictional world, love can be bait, trust can be harvested, identity can be engineered, and death itself can become a commodity.
The book explores the terrifying evolution of cybercrime from anonymous hacking to emotional exploitation at scale.
Its predators do not simply break into systems. They study loneliness. They manufacture intimacy. They learn what people need to hear and when they need to hear it.
They turn affection into access, shame into silence, and fear into profit.
Beneath the surface of the story is a deeply contemporary anxiety: in a world where artificial intelligence, deepfakes, encrypted networks, stolen identities, and global criminal pipelines are converging, how do we know who is real, what is true, and whether the future we are being sold belongs to us at all?
For Markert, cyber thrillers are not just entertainment. They are a way to dramatize the threats already pressing against the edges of ordinary life.
He is drawn to this genre because it allows him to combine the pace of a commercial thriller with the urgency of real-world questions.
What happens when technology outpaces accountability?
Who benefits when systems become too complex for the average person to understand?
How do predators exploit the gap between trust and verification?
And what kind of courage does it take to fight an enemy who may never appear in the room?
His fiction is shaped by the same instincts that defined his executive life: pattern recognition, strategic pressure, systems thinking, and an awareness that every crisis begins long before the public sees the explosion.
But what makes his thrillers resonate is not technology alone.
It is the human cost beneath the breach.
The widow.
The daughter.
The victim who believed the wrong voice.
The investigator who knows something is off before anyone else will listen.
The person who realizes, too late, that the trap was not built around a password or a bank account, but around the oldest vulnerability in the world: the desire to be seen.
That is the territory Markert is claiming as a novelist.
Death Watch opened the door.
Death Market goes deeper—into the hidden corridors of online deception, the predators who profit from trust, and the nightmare possibility that the darkest marketplace on earth is not selling secrets anymore.
It is selling futures.
Death Watch is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many fine bookstores.
Death Market is due for release in the fall.
For more info on the author, Tom Markert, visit https://tommarkert.com/.
