About the book
Restoration Games
A crime novel rooted in a world most people never see.
Restoration Games is the story of Gary Denson, a charming, calculating opportunist who drifts from city to city across Canada, leaving damage behind him long after the smoke clears. He understands the restoration and insurance ecosystem well enough to exploit it—and he does. Fires, floods, and personal disasters become tools in a larger con built on deception, manipulation, and stolen trust.
As Gary plays his game, others in the industry are playing their own. Insurance adjusters, contractors, brokers, tradespeople, and investigators all operate within systems that reward speed, volume, and silence. Some bend rules. Others cross lines. A few try to hold onto integrity in an environment that quietly punishes it.
What begins as calculated fraud escalates into something darker. The novel moves between cities, timelines, and perspectives, revealing how small ethical compromises accumulate into irreversible consequences. Fires are investigated. Money disappears. People vanish. And the truth, once buried, refuses to stay hidden.
Restoration Games is an insider’s look at how modern systems can be gamed, how trust is weaponized, and how easily responsibility gets lost when everyone is chasing a payout.
Twenty-five years of Disaster Recovery
When disaster strikes, the headlines capture the destruction. This book begins with the aftermath, when the news cameras have gone and the difficult work of recovering what remains must begin.
For twenty-five years, Bob Oliver responded to floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and industrial catastrophes across fifteen countries and every continent except Antarctica. His work took him into damaged hospitals, flooded buildings, collapsed warehouses, remote mines, and communities confronting losses they could never have anticipated.
He stood on a sandbag dike in Winnipeg and watched six hours of backbreaking work disappear beneath the Red River in minutes. In India, he helped direct an international effort to recover 100,000 irreplaceable books and manuscripts submerged in contaminated floodwater. Elsewhere, he worked to preserve confidential records, historic archives, electronics, industrial equipment, and personal possessions that carried value far beyond their physical form.
These experiences taught him that nature does not negotiate. They also revealed what people are capable of when buildings fail, history is threatened, and the familiar world is suddenly turned upside down.
