Dominic Shaw spent fifteen years in corporate security and loss prevention — the legitimate side of the same expertise his characters abuse — designing the vaults, access protocols, and audit trails that his crews now spend their nights defeating. He knows exactly how a real freeport works, which is why he’s so good at breaking one on paper.

Raised in Manchester and later Chicago, the son of an insurance investigator, Dominic grew up at dinner tables where the conversation was who did it, how, and what tell gave them away. He built a career assessing physical and financial security for high-net-worth clients and art handlers, and spent it quietly fascinated by the same question every heist writer serves: not can it be stolen, but who deserves to lose it. He started writing the Blackline novels on long flights between client sites, mapping scores on cocktail napkins he was probably not supposed to keep.

His Blackline Crew series follows a planner named Cole and a team of specialists who lift dirty money, laundered art, and stolen wealth from marks who can’t dial 911 — elegant capers with real tradecraft, distinct crew members, and a betrayal in every book that plays fair on the reread. The security is accurate, the plans are buildable, and the double-crosses are earned.

Dominic lives in the Chicago suburbs with his partner, Renee, a forensic accountant who checks his laundering trails for plausibility and loses every argument about whether the crew would really get away with it, and a German shepherd named Vault who is, he admits, poorly named for a guard dog. He still can’t walk through an airport without clocking the cameras.