Nobody makes spy movies about accountants. So when two ex-CIA operatives hand a forensic-accounting professor a case, the money runs through Malta, the bodies start adding up, and the ledgers turn out to be the deadliest thing in the room.

Nobody makes spy movies about accountants?which is exactly the kind of oversight that gets people killed. Told in lean, wisecracking, Sam Spade?style prose, Accounting for Spies drops forensic-accounting professor Ben Stone and his partner, Philadelphia homicide detective Sharon Levin, into a job handed over by two ex-CIA operatives gone private. A mid-sized accounting firm's money is running through Malta?casinos, cryptocurrency, and a trail that points toward terrorists and weapons?and the deeper Stone works the ledgers, the less they balance. Between a knife-fight of a faculty tenure battle at home and a money-laundering hunt that spans continents, he learns the oldest rule in the book: follow the money, and the money will lead you somewhere it doesn't want you to go. Brainy, funny, and hardboiled to the last decimal.