The Widow’s House (Book Four of the Dagger and the Coin) – Daniel Abraham
I enjoyed reading the latest in Abraham’s Dagger and the Coin series, but I do feel like the story quality has diminished since the beginning of the series. As usual, Abraham seems to slip in major financial ideas, almost in an underhanded way of teaching finance to unsuspecting Fantasy readers. Previous books focused on lending and underwriting, but the big reveal in this one (somewhat of a spoiler alert), relates to sovereign debt and essentially the creation of a federal reserve. Abraham uses this as a vehicle to use economics to compete with war, though it seems to me to be a temporary solution, at best, since sovereign has historically been used to fund wars, at times.