Paw Prints in the Ledger

 She’ll tell you all about embezzlement and fraud—when she’s not hip deep in training her faithful dog.

About the Book:  Irene Lisner is dedicated to her job as a forensic accountant with Oregon’s Justice Department. Recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, she battles every day to make her body do the things she needs it to do while managing a high-stress job. Training her dog for the next agility trial helps her blow off steam, but he’s at the end of his career as an agility dog—and she’s not feeling as good as she’d like.

Being assigned a politically fraught case forces her to work even longer hours instead of getting the rest her doctor recommends. But when checks are discovered missing during a standard audit for the city of West Linn, Irene is sure the city’s problems go beyond staff turnover and the political drama created by the new media hound mayor.

While coping with the often ambiguous, always unrelenting symptoms of MS, Irene and her team confront corruption, embezzlement, and political maneuvering. Under enormous stress, she identifies underlying problems for city officials, confronts the embezzler, and seeks to reconcile a future with a potentially debilitating diagnosis.

Our Review: It’s always a treat when you read a book that features not only well-drawn and layered characters but offers the opportunity to learn something new. In the case of Paw Prints in the Ledger, this math dummy learned about forensic accounting, what goes into the training and care necessary to succeed in the competitive world of canine agility trials, and—perhaps most important—the latest in effective treatment options for Multiple Sclerosis. Best of all, we hear there’s more coming in this forensic accounting series, so hang on. We can’t help but wonder what we’ll learn next.

Based on a scale of 1-5, Paw Prints in the Ledger merits a 7.

Kat Henry Doran, Wild Women Reviews