Nina Reilly

Returning from her late shift as a barmaid at a casino in Lake Tahoe, Misty Patterson struck her violently jealous husband in self-defense. She admits that—but did she kill him? She says she can't remember. Like so many times before, Misty blacked out and the rest of the evening is a blank. Now her husband has disappeared, leaving behind a trail of blood, and she's the number-one murder suspect with no one to turn to for help.

Two people have died in macabre accidents, one struck by lightning on Tahoe's highest mountain and one mowed down by a hit-and-run driver. In the middle of a controversial procedure to exhume one of the bodies, powerful businessman Quentin de Beers is killed. Charged with the murder, Quentin's angry grandson Jason won't talk, even to Nina, his defense attorney. To save her client, Nina must expose the truth about his troubled family and untangle the hidden connections that link all three deaths.

In glitzy Lake Tahoe, couples break up every day. But few are as successful as Lindy and Mike Markov, who built a $200-million business together—before Mike took up with a younger woman. Now he's claiming he doesn't owe Lindy a dime since they never married. Attorney Nina Reilly, struggling to make a living in her one-woman office and raise a young son alone, agrees to take Lindy's case. Nina knows winning is a long shot, even with a brilliant jury consultant and a palimony expert on her side.

Amid the sparkling snow-swept mountains of Lake Tahoe, Nina Reilly has made a home, juggling the demands of her one-woman law practice and raising a teenage son alone. Now Nina has taken on a case that will threaten everything she holds dear, drawing her into a tangled web of loyalties and alliances within one of Lake Tahoe’s most prominent families. Her client: a man accused of murdering his own brother—on the ski slopes of Tahoe. The law says Nina must give Jim Strong the best possible defense.

An attorney and single mother, Nina Reilly runs her one-woman law practice in South Lake Tahoe, balancing compassion and cunning with a passion for justice. But Nina is wholly unprepared for her latest client--six- teen-year-old Nicole Zack, a rebel, a thief, and the best friend of Nina's teenage son, Bob. Did Nikki steal something from her uncle, a prominent plastic surgeon, and then kill him with an ancient samurai sword? The district attorney is trying Nikki as an adult and the charge is first degree murder.

Nina Reilly needs a fresh start. In three years, she's taken on some of Lake Tahoe's most controversial cases and has turned her struggling one-woman law firm into a thriving practice. Now she's ready to sort out her complex relationship with her boyfriend, Monterey P.I. Paul Van Wagoner. So she's heading to the Carmel Valley, the place where she began her career and where her estranged father lives. It's also a place of dramatic contradictions and hidden tensions, of new wealth and old families. And, within days of her arrival, Nina is already feeling the heat.

Nina has just received a last-minute call from her old boss and mentor in Monterey County, California, where she is enjoying the breathtaking scenery and spending time with her boyfriend, P.I. Paul van Wagoner. Klaus Pohlmann is in desperate straits and begs Nina to take over a seemingly unwinnable case: A luckless two-time felon named Stefan Wyatt has robbed a grave and made off with the long-buried bones of a Russian émigré. When he is caught and arrested, further devastating evidence found in the grave suggests that Stefan is guilty of a far more deadly crime.

In this eagerly anticipated, brand-new Nina Reilly thriller, Perri O'Shaughnessy takes listeners back to Nina's first murder investigation, to the case that ignites her passionate commitment to fighting for justice. Working as a paralegal and attending law school at night, Nina has her hands full. She's fighting for custody of her young son Bob and overseeing a medical malpractice lawsuit on behalf of her mother, Virigina Reilly, whose health is rapidly declining after she suffered complications from an acupuncture procedure.

A mix of slick and seamy, South Lake Tahoe, California, is the perfect setting for adventurers, criminals—and lawyers. In addition to coping with her demanding, sometimes creepy, clients, Nina Reilly is dealing with prickly personal issues involving her sixteen-year-old son Bob, his estranged father, and her investigator, confidante, and sometimes lover Paul van Wagoner. Then, in walks disaster.....