Former estate agent’s novel about industry skullduggery a best-seller
Keith Pearson, who worked as an estate agent for 15 years before becoming a novelist, says his old job has been the inspiration for his 18th novel.
A new novel by a former estate agent that tells the unusual tale of a trainee negotiator making his way within the industry during the bleak years of the 1990s has become a best-seller on Amazon’s Kindle marketplace.
No Easy Deeds by Keith Pearson (main image) is his eighteenth novel but his first to feature the property industry, which is surprising as he worked within the sector for fifteen years.
His career began in 1990 working as a negotiator for GA Property Services in Aldershot, Hampshire and later Townends, Halifax Property Services, and Bairstow Eves before setting up his own agency in the early 2000s.
“This was a time of double-digit interest rates, negative equity, mass repossessions, and The Property Misdescriptions Act was still two years away,” Pearson tells The Negotiator.
He then quit the industry in 2005 and a year later embarked on a new career as a novelist.
The plot of No Easy Deeds opens in September 1990 and follows Danny Monk as he searches for a job during the depths of that decade’s recession prompted by high interest rates, with the mass riots over the poll tax as the backdrop.
Negotiator
Danny gets a job as a negotiator with fictional agency Gibley Smith and his new job results in the “strangest of encounters, and an offer that seems almost too good to be true – complete a somewhat unorthodox challenge in exchange for the deeds of a detached house”, says Pearson.
“What Danny doesn’t realise is that there’s far more to both his challenge and reward than he could possibly imagine. The inspiration behind Danny’s story is my own experience of working as an estate agent.
“Although the industry was underregulated and the economic background bleak, it was in many ways more enjoyable than when I left in 2005.
“There were certainly more ‘characters’, and some of those made it to the pages of No Easy Deeds, although I had to change a few names which, if you read the book, you’ll understand why.”
No Easy Deeds is avaialbe via the Amazon Kindle marketplace for £2.99.
