BOOK REVIEWS
CASE OF LIES. By Perri O'Shaughnessy. Delacorte Press, 390 pages, $25, hardcover.
Gambling, math skills a factor in solving murder with few clues
By Judy Counts
Special to THE DAILY
In this 11th installment of a series, attorney Nina Reilly returns from Carmel, Calif., to her home in Lake Tahoe. Having recently ended an intimate relationship with her former private investigator, Nina is anxious to resume her practice in Tahoe and to re-establish the bond with her 14-year-old son, Bob - a bond which, as a single mother and resolute professional, Nina feels she has neglected.
Murderer returns
She is soon asked to take on a two-year-old case of negligent security involving the apparently accidental death of a woman during a robbery at a local hotel. With an alcoholic client, reluctant and/or missing witnesses and very few clues, the case seems hopeless. It becomes even more daunting when the murderer seems to have returned, intent on eliminating anyone who may try to bring him to justice.
Nina and her associates slog through the few existing clues, most of them leading to dead ends. Finally, they are directed to the mathematics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where an edgy professor and some of his students seem to be part of the equation as well as the solution. The whiz kids apparently have paid previous college expenses by parlaying their extensive math skills into big winnings at Tahoe's casino blackjack tables.
They are identified first as witnesses in the hotel robbery; then it becomes obvious that they were the victims. But what were the thieves after? Was it the few thousand dollars in gambling winnings, or did one of the students have knowledge of something much more valuable?
This novel contains all the most enjoyable elements of the typical O'Shaughnessy mystery. Some of Bob's antics at home in Tahoe bring a chuckle or two.
And even though Nina's longtime boyfriend Paul is out of the picture, the trail of evidence leads her to Germany, where her son's father, Kurt, now lives. She finds herself depending on Kurt for protection and assistance, and their brief affair of 15 years ago begins to rekindle into a new romance.
Word of warning
A word of warning, however - this story often gets bogged down in mathematics, prime number theories and Internet security encryption codes. It often reads more like a college text than a work of escape literature. O'Shaughnessy seems to be well aware of this fact. At one point, after a long discussion of Riemann Surfaces and Hermitian matrices, she writes of Nina: "The prime-numbers book turned out to have medicinal properties. She was asleep in the pale sun within five minutes of opening it."
If you are an O'Shaughnessy fan, you can quickly scan the plodding math-filled chapters of this novel to get to more familiar and satisfying prose. If you have never read a Nina Reilly tale, I advise you not to start with this one for one reason: If you get totally bored, as I often did with the scholarly passages, you may not stick around for what turns out to be an exciting, if not totally unexpected, conclusion. And that excitement is what keeps this Perri O'Shaughnessy fan anxiously awaiting the next Nina Reilly mystery.
CASE OF LIES. By Perri O'Shaughnessy. Delacorte Press, 390 pages, $25, hardcover.
Gambling, math skills a factor in solving murder with few clues
By Judy Counts
Special to THE DAILY
In this 11th installment of a series, attorney Nina Reilly returns from Carmel, Calif., to her home in Lake Tahoe. Having recently ended an intimate relationship with her former private investigator, Nina is anxious to resume her practice in Tahoe and to re-establish the bond with her 14-year-old son, Bob - a bond which, as a single mother and resolute professional, Nina feels she has neglected.
Murderer returns
She is soon asked to take on a two-year-old case of negligent security involving the apparently accidental death of a woman during a robbery at a local hotel. With an alcoholic client, reluctant and/or missing witnesses and very few clues, the case seems hopeless. It becomes even more daunting when the murderer seems to have returned, intent on eliminating anyone who may try to bring him to justice.
Nina and her associates slog through the few existing clues, most of them leading to dead ends. Finally, they are directed to the mathematics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where an edgy professor and some of his students seem to be part of the equation as well as the solution. The whiz kids apparently have paid previous college expenses by parlaying their extensive math skills into big winnings at Tahoe's casino blackjack tables.
They are identified first as witnesses in the hotel robbery; then it becomes obvious that they were the victims. But what were the thieves after? Was it the few thousand dollars in gambling winnings, or did one of the students have knowledge of something much more valuable?
This novel contains all the most enjoyable elements of the typical O'Shaughnessy mystery. Some of Bob's antics at home in Tahoe bring a chuckle or two.
And even though Nina's longtime boyfriend Paul is out of the picture, the trail of evidence leads her to Germany, where her son's father, Kurt, now lives. She finds herself depending on Kurt for protection and assistance, and their brief affair of 15 years ago begins to rekindle into a new romance.
Word of warning
A word of warning, however - this story often gets bogged down in mathematics, prime number theories and Internet security encryption codes. It often reads more like a college text than a work of escape literature. O'Shaughnessy seems to be well aware of this fact. At one point, after a long discussion of Riemann Surfaces and Hermitian matrices, she writes of Nina: "The prime-numbers book turned out to have medicinal properties. She was asleep in the pale sun within five minutes of opening it."
If you are an O'Shaughnessy fan, you can quickly scan the plodding math-filled chapters of this novel to get to more familiar and satisfying prose. If you have never read a Nina Reilly tale, I advise you not to start with this one for one reason: If you get totally bored, as I often did with the scholarly passages, you may not stick around for what turns out to be an exciting, if not totally unexpected, conclusion. And that excitement is what keeps this Perri O'Shaughnessy fan anxiously awaiting the next Nina Reilly mystery.