The forensic account slightly reminds me of Kinsey Millhone.

Goodreads Author, Colleen Cross introduces readers to a wonderful new protagonist, Katerina Carter. I received a free copy of this audiobook from and am voluntarily leaving an honest review. It wouldn't keep me from listening to her in the future though. Unfortunately, the voices for Cindy and Susan weren't always consistent between chapters. She had a wide range of voices and accents. I liked the narration by Petrea Burchard.

I'm looking forward to listening to the next book in the series, Game Theory. That said, there's an interesting plot, intriguing characters, and a resolution that wasn't predictable. The biggest issue here is that Katerina does a lot of thoughtless, dangerous, and downright illegal acts that stretch believability. At times it felt more like someone reading off large chunks of Wikipedia rather than a conversation.Ībout a third of the way through, the pacing picks up quite a bit and the mystery/thriller aspect is much more enjoyable. While the facts about accounting, blood diamonds, and corporate stocks were interesting and necessary for the book, I wish this had been broken up a bit and perhaps been presented during more natural dialogue. The book starts slowly, bogged down quite a bit by a huge amount of exposition in long monologues used explain certain facts/history/procedures. She's approached about a huge corporate theft and it's the opportunity to get her own finances back in the black. It isn't going well and she's about to shut the doors. Katerina Carter is a down-on-her luck forensic accountant trying to find success with her own private investigation firm. This is my first experience with author Colleen Cross and narrator Petrea Burchard. With the help of her friends and an eccentric uncle, Kat had better tread carefully or her first case might also end up being her last. All she has to do now is get proof-and keep from getting killed before she exposes the real criminals.

Kat realizes that this investigation might be more dangerous than she expected.Īs if things weren’t complicated enough, she uncovers a sinister connection between blood diamonds and organized crime. Abject poverty is a great motivator for taking hard cases, but her excitement soon turns to terror when two employees of the company are brutally murdered. So when Liberty Diamond Mines CEO Susan Sullivan hires Kat to find Liberty’s missing CFO and a large sum of embezzled money, she’s a little too eager to accept the job. And to Kat that’s a fate worse than debt. Now that’s she’s out of work and running out of money, Kat needs to get more clients, or she’ll be forced to go crawling back to a cubicle at her previous firm. Fraud investigator, Katerina Carter just doesn’t know when to quit, which lands her in some pretty messy and precarious situations.

Exit Strategy by Colleen Cross