The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Baru Cormorant #1) (2015)

The decisive weapon in this book is a ledger. Baru watches the Masquerade take her island through trade treaties, schools, medicine and planned epidemics, and she sets out to master its methods: Seth Dickinson's 2015 debut sends her, a star of its schools, as Imperial Accountant to Aurdwynn, a rebellious province of thirteen duchies, meaning to bring the empire down from inside. Armies do march once the province rises, but the moves that count are made with loans, inflation and a fiat currency, and Dickinson makes them more gripping than most writers' sieges. Know before you start that the ending is savage. For economics treated as statecraft, it has no equal on this list.