They’re easily overlooked and sometimes underappreciated – except at tax time. Yes, I’m talking of accountants. They often know more about a person’s finances than anyone else. They know financial law, they know how to manage money, and of course, their records are critical to business and personal financial planning. They are important sources of information when it comes to crime, too. Police and other law enforcement agencies rely on forensic accountancy to solve crimes, and accountants can provide police with possible financial motives for murder. Sometimes accounting firms can even be involved in crime (Enron/Arthur Anderson, anyone?). There are plenty of examples of accountants in crime fiction. Here are just a few.

In David Dodge’s Death and Taxes, we meet George MacLeod, a successful San Francisco accountant. One day, he gets a new client, wealthy Marian Wolff. She’s facing charges of tax evasion, and she wants MacLeod to help her find a way to dodge the taxes she owes and get a refund. MacLeod is good at finding tax loopholes, and this new client is willing to pay well, so he agrees to work with her. It’s going to be a major challenge, though, so MacLeod contacts his business partner, James ‘Whit’ Whitney, to come back early from a trip he’s taking and help with this case. By the time Whit gets back to San Francisco, though, MacLeod’s been shot. Now, Whit’s going to have to find out who the killer is if he’s to stay alive himself.

Anthony Bidulka’s Flight of Aquavit introduces successful Saskatoon accountant Daniel Guest. He’s a married, ‘closeted’ gay man who’s being blackmailed over his trysts with other men. He hires PI Russell Quant to find out who the blackmailer is and get that person to stop. At first, Quant demurs, suggesting that Guest would be better off announcing that he’s gay. But Guest is convinced that that would ruin his career, to say nothing of his marriage, and refuses to consider it. Quant takes the case and begins to investigate. It’s not an easy case, and it turns out that more than one person could have had a reason to want to kill Guest.

In David Rosenfelt’s Unleashed, New Jersey lawyer Andy Carpenter gets a new client – his own accountant, Sam Willis. A client and old high school friend, Barry Price, has been killed in a plane crash, and it’s just come out that he was poisoned before he boarded the plane. His widow is the first and most likely suspect, but she implicates Willis. Her story is that she and Willis were having an affair, and that Willis killed her husband to be with her. It doesn’t help Willis’ case that he was meant to travel on the ill-fated flight, but at the last minute didn’t. The evidence supports Willis’ guilt, and he is duly arrested. He hires Carpenter to defend him, but it’s going to be a very difficult case. If Willis is not guilty, then who is?

Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow is the story of Smilla Jaspersen, a young half-Inuit Greenlander who now lives in Copenhagen. When Isaiah Christiansen, a boy who lives in her building, dies from an apparent fall from the roof, she becomes curious as to how it happened. Although it seemed accidental, traces in the snow on the roof suggest something else to Smilla. She gets even more suspicious when it comes out that there was a small injection mark on the boy’s body. Smilla knew the boy and decides to find out what happened to him. The trail leads to Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. It’s not long before Smilla learns of a bookkeeper, Elsa Lübing, who worked there. When she discovers that Elsa was quickly promoted from bookkeeper to head accountant, she guesses that Elsa must have very useful information on the company, and so it turns out to be. With that information, Smilla is able to trace the company’s doings, and find out how Cryolite is linked to Isaiah Christiansen’s death.

There are, of course, several fictional sleuths with accounting skills and background. For instance, Emma Lathen’s John Putnam Thatcher is a vice president for Sloan Guaranty Trust, a large New York bank. In several novels in this series, there are accounting irregularities (and worse) that draw Thatcher into cases involving fraud, embezzlement, murder, and more.

There’s also Ian Hamilton’s Ava Lee, a Toronto-based forensic accountant who, in the first several books in the series, works for a Hong Kong company run by Chow Tung, a man Ava refers to as ‘Uncle.’ This is the company people turn to when they’ve been cheated out of money and, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t go to the police. Ava is extremely skilled at finding money that people want to keep hidden. She uses computer ‘footprints,’ among other things, to trace money from the client to the person or people who stole it. Her work takes her all over the world, and she’s learned just about every trick there is to hide money and find it again.

Kerry Greenwood is a Melbourne-based former accountant. In Earthly Delights, the first book in the series, we learn that she grew disenchanted with accountancy and has followed her passion for baking. She owns a successful small bakery of which she’s quite proud. But that doesn’t mean she’s forgotten how to make sense of numbers. She’s friends with the other residents of the building in which she lives and works and is happy to help with their accountancy questions and financial decision-making.

And that’s the thing. We don’t always think of accountants (unless it’s tax season or time to probate a will). But they’re useful, often happy to help, and very knowledgeable. Little wonder the police depend on them for information.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Joe Walsh’s Life’s Been Good.