The Water Rat of Wanchai by Ian Hamilton, published 5th, is chronologically the 1st globetrotting adventure with forensic accountant and martial artist Ava Lee, beginning her career as she tracks a client's stolen money to Guyana (available May 6, 2014). Ava Lee is a cultured, whipsmart Chinese-Canadian lesbian forensic accountant, who looks unassuming, but has…
For years, crime fiction writers have used first-person narrators to describe the world around them. Hard boiled P.I.s would tell you what a seedy bar smelled like or what kind of body a suspicious dame had. But what sort of insights into the world of crime would a blind narrator provide? How would he describe…
Contraband (trailer at the link) represents an interesting journey, and not just for smuggled currency. Arnaldur Indridason (Indriðason) co-wrote the screenplay for the award-winning movie upon which it’s based, Reykjavik-Rotterdam, a film about smuggling alcohol produced by and starring Baltasar Kormákur. To any questions you may have about Indridason as a film guy, the Icelandic…
It’s no secret that people consider CPAs to be hopeless nerds. After all, only a total dork with lousy social skills would want to sit at a desk all day dealing with boring numbers, right? Except numbers aren’t nearly as boring as one might think. On the contrary, numbers are, in fact, nasty little snitches.…
The last Sherlock Holmes’ story, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,” was published in April, 1927, in The Strand Magazine. But long before that, 1911 to be exact, Monsignor Ronald A. Knox presented a paper to the Gryphon Club in London entitled “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” That paper was the cornerstone of…
