Though her professional life seems on track, her personal life is rife with difficulties. Ever since her parents divorced several years earlier, her mother’s physical health has declined, and her brother Matt is being influenced way too much by drugs and unsavory acquaintances. Though the father of her four-year-old son Bob has never been a presence in Bob’s life, Richard Filson has suddenly decided to demand his parental rights, leaving Nina with way too much to deal with on the home front.

Nina tries to persuade Richard that his son’s best interests reside in leaving him in her sole custody, though she does agree to have Bob take the appropriate tests to determine if he is genetically Richard’s son. She does find it extremely difficult to hold a civil conversation with her one time lover. When Richard ends up murdered, her name immediately comes up… and another murder follows on the heels of Richard’s, another in which Nina also figures prominently.

Faithful readers of the popular Nina Reilly series will enjoy this look back in time to the beginning of her law career. Nina is clearly goal oriented and she wants a successful career as a lawyer while not shirking her duty and devotion to her young son. The demands of her mother, brother, and newly remarried father take a toll on her as well. While she obviously has the intelligence to juggle her many responsibilities her efforts at times seem superhuman. As decisive as she can be in her professional capacity, her several options on the boyfriend/lover front present her as wishy-washy making her difficult to empathize with.

While there are some interesting aspects of law that come up during the course of the story, the novel is centered more on relationships than on action. Not all of the characters are well drawn. While Nina herself is credible, Jack, his law school buddy Paul von Waggoner, and Remy Sorenson act so erratically it is difficult to conceive of them as real people. They present themselves as rational individuals but when presented with romantic entanglements they lose their sanity. They act more like teenagers than twenty or thirty somethings.

There is a lack of cohesiveness in this novel which makes it a less than satisfying read. Nina ’s life is directed in too many different directions at once. She needs to take care of her son, she needs to look out for her mother, she needs to attend to her career, she needs to go to law school, and she ends up being pulled in so many directions that nothing seems destined for a successful conclusion. She is portrayed as being tenacious though she demonstrates little of this quality in her daily life. Perhaps as she gets a bit older, she will finish one thought before she begins another.

--Andy Plonka