About Me
The Analyst
David Cross is the pen name of Ayokunle Bamigbaiye — a certified business analyst whose career has taken him inside energy infrastructure, humanitarian logistics, and global supply chains across continents.
He has spent years mapping the distance between how systems are designed to work and how they actually fail — often with devastating consequences. His fiction explores the people caught inside that gap: the analysts, the operators, the fixers, and the ones who see the collapse coming before anyone else does.
He writes at the intersection of human nature and institutional collapse.
“Satellites cannot extract memory from a corpse.”
VISION
“To write stories that change how readers see the world — and remain with them long after the final page.”
MISSION
To bring the analytical precision of real-world systems experience to fiction about the people who run them, break them, and survive their failures.
REACH
Currently operating in North America, with stories spanning from the shadows of London to the geopolitics of Novi Sad.
A Conversation with Cross: Debut Author
How a radio documentary on phone theft sparked a novel
We sat down with Mr. Cross to talk about his debut novel and the unexpected spark behind it.
Interviewer: Business Analyst to Author — walk us through the journey.
Cross: Writing wasn’t something I planned. At the time, I was working as a business analyst, helping organizations improve efficiency, identify gaps, and shape strategy. One morning, during my morning rituals, I listened to a radio documentary about phone theft at a UK train station.
Something about it stayed with me. It opened questions about conflict, consequence, and the unseen stories behind ordinary events. That idea became the nucleus of the novel.
This is my debut — the first real literary work I’ve written — and writing it allowed me to explore an aspect of myself I hadn’t really paid much attention to. I discovered I genuinely enjoyed the process.
Interviewer: First book, and a very diverse cast. How did you keep everything together?
Cross: The novel follows seven or eight key characters, and early on that felt ambitious. What helped was realizing they were all connected by a single underlying question: Who am I becoming?
There’s a Crown agent attempting to uphold the law. An immigrant trying to survive who steals a device hoping for a quick escape. And shadow operatives shaped by unresolved conflicts from past wars, carrying their grievances into the present.
Each character brings a history, and my task was to weave those histories toward a single convergence point.
Interviewer: Tell us about some of the characters in the book, if okay
Take the antagonist, Dmitry Volkov. He comes from the Balkans, shaped by loss after his sister died during a military intervention meant to end a regional conflict. That unresolved grief drives his choices.
I never wanted villains to feel cartoonish. They are human beings shaped by circumstance — fictional characters, certainly, but grounded in realities we recognize.
Interviewer: How was your expereince writing this novel and what comes next?
Mr. Cross: Okay, so the question you asked about how my experience was writing the book, at a point, of course, I had a bit of momentum issues, you know, at the beginning, trying to get everything together. And then at a point, I felt a bit lethargic too, at a point, was almost like, will I actually finish it and all that? But I pushed through, I was able to complete it and all that. And it gave me a profound sense of satisfaction to actually have finished, you know, writing the book.
And then regarding what I want to do afterwards now, I think I’m already thinking about my next story. The idea is already coming up in my mind and who knows, it might carry us from here to India or probably Wall Street, but something is nice and is cooking already. So stay tuned.
And of course, you will get to enjoy the next story. Thank you.