Going Concern

Naomi Voss has spent twenty years teaching junior auditors one rule: a sentence you don't understand is a sentence somebody put there on purpose.Now she is the Examiner of Record for the Thornbury Family Trust, a two-hundred-year-old Rhode Island mill fortune, and the controller who kept its books has just been found dead in his garage. The money isn't missing. Every quarter for thirty years, $1,140,000 has gone out and come back the next day, round and exact, in payment of a debt that appears nowhere on the balance sheet. The accounting software keeps converting the amounts into a currency her spreadsheets were never built to hold.The debt is older than the republic. It was signed in 1791, it compounds in days, and it is collateralized against the lives of the Thornbury heirs, one of whom turns forty in nine weeks. The other side has better lawyers than anyone should have to face, and they have already made Naomi's firm a generous offer.Her signature can perfect the debt or refuse it. Either way, somebody pays. Somewhere in the fine print is a third thing, and the only way to find it is to read every page.Going Concern is a procedural thriller where the audit trail leads somewhere much older and much hotter than the fiscal year, and where the most dangerous document in the room is the one nobody has signed.