How do you kill a city?

You bury it in red tape. You let bureaucrats decide who gets ahead and who gets crushed. You build a system so tangled in rules and politics that the only way to win is to already be on the inside.

Ellerton was that kind of city. A place where businesses didn’t succeed, they survived. Where permits took years unless you knew the right people. Where progress wasn’t about vision; it was about control.

Clara Reed wasn’t supposed to be a threat. She just wanted to rebuild her family’s market. But the more she fought to follow the rules, the more she realized the rules were never meant for people like her.

She wasn’t alone. A tech entrepreneur with nothing left to lose. An investor with a grudge twenty years in the making. A town waking up to the truth.

The system is collapsing. The old power brokers are losing their grip. And Clara is faced with the most dangerous question of all:

What happens when the people who fought the system become the ones who control it?

Inspired by real battles in economic development, Red Tape Empire is a gut-punch novel about power, corruption, and what it takes to save a city, from an insider who’s seen it all.