SMOKE IN MIRRORS

A Nancy Drewish turn from perennial bestseller Krentz (Soft Focus, 2000, etc.).

Leonora Hutton, academic librarian and all-around sex goddess, just claimed the body of her half-sister Meredith Spooner. Now a strange man is claiming that Meredith embezzled more than a million dollars from the Eubanks College endowment fund before her mysterious death. Thomas Walker is a magnetically sexy animal whose reclusive brother Deke was married to Bethany, a mathematician in charge of the endowment fund who also died mysteriously. Deke might be implicated in the embezzlement unless Thomas can unmask the real culprit. So Thomas wants answers—now. Well, Leonora explains, Meredith had emotional problems because she never met their father, who’s long dead (her heartless, no-account mother produced evil little Meredith via sperm donation). Feeling deprived of a real dad and other fun things, she began to embezzle and play nasty pranks, like seducing Leonora’s former fiancé just to show her half-sister that he was no good. Accompanied by Thomas, Leonora pays a visit to Eubanks College on the fog-shrouded shores of Puget Sound. She can pretend to be reorganizing the card catalogue at Mirror House, the spooky Victorian mansion filled with unusual antique mirrors. Maybe then she can find out why Meredith circled the oddly ornate mirror on page 81 of the house’s catalogue of mirrors. Speaking of mirrors, there were rumors that both Bethany and Meredith had been using a new hallucinogen called “S and M” (for Smoke and Mirrors, of course). Along with a placebo stress reliever for high-strung academicians, S and M is being pushed by an amber-eyed con man named Alex Rhodes. But Deke swears Bethany never touched drugs of any kind, although she wouldn’t be the first substance abuser on campus. Why, world-famous mathematician Osmond Kern, inventor of an algorithm that proved to be immensely important to the computer industry, is drinking himself to death. It’s almost as if he knows something no one else knows…

For the fans.