Accosting the Golden Spire
by D. Larry Crumbley, Christopher G. Jones, Stacy A. Mastrolia
Category: Business & Economics

Accosting the Golden Spire, Third Edition mixes financial fraud, crime, ethics, and accounting practice together to provide a better way of learning the accounting process. Featuring a sleuth who handles balance sheets and income statements the way most detectives handle guns, Lenny Cramer and his humorous sidekick put accounting and business concepts into real-life context. Dr. Cramer, a professor at the Wharton School, operates a small forensic accounting firm. He teaches, testifies before Congress, and appears as an expert witness in a court battle. But the real action occurs when he investigates financial fraud in a friend's jade shop. Using his forensic skills, he uncovers a plot to steal treasures from a remote Asian country and almost gets himself killed trying to stop the heist. Golden Spire is an educational novel designed as a supplement to financial accounting courses and professional ethics seminars at either the undergraduate or graduate level. It has been used successfully near the end of principles of accounting, at the beginning of intermediate accounting, and as basis for the discussion of professional codes of conduct in an accounting ethics course. The supplement would also be ideal for an MBA program which has a light coverage of accounting, or in CPA firms' in-house training programs as an enrichment exercise. Classroom tests of early drafts of this third edition and the previous two published editions have demonstrated repeatedly that students enjoy reading the instructional thriller and learn the accounting concepts more readily than through traditional texts.