Dan Buzzetta is an attorney who has litigated civil cases for three decades. Since 2014 he has been a partner in the New York office of Baker Hostetler LLP. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Dan was raised on Staten Island, NY, and later attended Tufts University and Fordham Law School. The seeds for the novel that would become The Manipulator germinated in 1992 during the summer after Dan's first year of law school when he wrote the first two chapters. Although Dan intended to complete the project after law school, life's competing priorities took hold and the novel took a back seat to landing his first job at a New York City law firm, meeting the woman who would become his wife, starting a family, and building a career. It would take Dan almost 28 years before he was able to finish what he had started in law school. Those were the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when courts were all but shut, and Dan was working from home with nearly four "extra" hours in his day recouped from not commuting roundtrip to his Manhattan office from New Jersey. Dan's oldest son, who was a college-bound high school senior at the time, and had heard his dad mention through the years that one day he hoped to complete the novel he started many years earlier, encouraged Dan to fulfill his dream. With over two decades of experience handling high-stakes commercial business cases under his belt, Dan dusted off his old manuscript, which he had saved on a 3.5 inch "floppy disk", rewrote the first few chapters, and continued writing for more than a year. Indeed, much of the fictional legal wrangling recounted in The Manipulator was inspired, in part, by real life cases Dan handled, including an actual case where Dan and a team of lawyers worked closely with the Department of Justice and the FBI. After several years, the team succeeded in recovering almost a quarter billion dollars on behalf of thousands of innocent investors defrauded by foreign nationals in a stock manipulation scheme.

Today Dan continues to live in New Jersey, with his wife, three children, and rescue dog Bentley. When he's not practicing law and writing, Dan volunteers his time for his community as a firefighter and a member of his town's legislative body to which he was elected in November 2024 and began serving in January 2025. Dan's second novel in the Tom Berte Legal Thriller series, The Winter Verdict, is slated for release in February 2026.

Publication of The Manipulator is proof that if you believe in yourself and in something worth doing, see it through to the end. After writing The Manipulator, Dan endured countless rejections from would-be agents based solely on a 240 word query letter. Even after Dan was fortunate enough to find an agent, several publishing houses passed on his work until Severn River Publishing read the manuscript and eagerly signed Dan to a multi-book publishing contract. Dan's path illustrates perfectly that perseverance in the face of rejection is its own reward. The journey to becoming a published author led Dan to understand that while the price of trying and failing is disappointment, the price of never trying at all is a lifetime of regret.