Book Review--Case of Lies, by Perri O'Shaughnessy

Nina Reilly is one of my all-time favorite characters. I tend to like legal thrillers, and Reilly is an amazing lawyer who actually has a heart.

Nina's latest case comes her way when her massage therapist, Chelsi, asks Nina to talk to her uncle. Chelsi's aunt, Sarah had been murdered nearly two years previously while she and Chelsi's uncle Dave had been staying at a motel. It seemed to be a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sarah had been shot while some other motel guests were being robbed. Even more tragically, Sarah had been pregnant with her first child at the time.

The shooter has not been found, and the Dave's civil case against the motel for negligence, having languished for two years, is about to be thrown out. Dave is broke, but Chelsi and her father are willing to pay the bills so that the case can go forward.

Nina has to race against the clock to gather more evidence before the judge tosses the case out. She searches for the robbery victims who were also witnesses to Sarah's murder, three brilliant MIT students who came to Tahoe to gamble. The students, master card counters, had won a lot of money the night they were robbed. The IDs they had provided were fake, so Nina has to figure out who and where they are, as well as try to find the shooter.

The student most central to the story is Elliott, a brilliant but unstable mathematician who is working on solving the mystery of prime numbers (numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves, such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. As yet, no one has discovered a formula for predicting the location of prime numbers. This means that really large composite numbers cannot be factored, due to the difficulty of finding the prime numbers of which they are composed. Interestingly, encryption based on this fact is the best method of encryption on the Internet at this point, thought there are other possibilities such as quantum encryption. These other possibilities will have to be further explored when someone does figure out the formula for locating prime numbers.

Anyway, that's what I like about O'Shaughnessy's books; they are highly readable, but I learn a lot. In reading this book, for example, I learned more about math, while in another I learned a more about Russian history. The only thing I regret is that they can't write and publish faster; I'm always so anxious to read their next book.