This awesome mystery, by an underappreciated author, was my first foray into Barbara Paul’s work – and my favorite.

Shelby Kent reads auras. Not like a fortune teller or a fake-psychic – although that’s what most people think she is, fake – but she can tell by the color of your aura whether you’re lying. Much of her work is with law enforcement, although cops tend to believe she’s a fake and when she proves true, treat her like a freak. Then her work with the NYPD brings her into a case involving stolen weapons – not just a gun or two, but a large shipment destined for overseas terrorists – and she comes onto the radar of the UN Special Intelligence team who is investigating a pattern of defective weapon sales to terrorists.

But Shelby has problems of her own. Shelby’s little sister is a concert pianist who doesn’t give concerts – her fear of performing has reduced her to plink-plonk ballet school accompanist in public while she compulsively strengthens her hand muscles¹, declines work her agent finds her, and reserves her virtuoso performances in the privacy of her own four walls.

And Shelby’s loser of a husband² deliberately lies to her, knowing that she will call him on it, to pick a fight. He’s tired of being married to a freak and wants her to give up her work with law enforcement and hide her abilities, be a good little stay-at-home wifey, so he can control the power in the relationship. He takes a job in California – a place Shelby hates – and persuades her to come along, not get involved in police work there, hide her light under a bushel and she agrees to preserve their marriage³.

But then the UN folks, who have apprehended the senior diplomats responsible for the weapons case, want her to sit in on the hearings. To the rest of the world, she will look like just another translator, but she will be provided with a special device: if one of the commissioners of the hearing of inquiry want to know if a statement just provided is a lie, they will push a button that will silently ping Shelby and she will reply with a simple yes or no that will light up on a board that only the commissioner can see.

Two conditions: she must be right in the hearing room, not monitoring remotely; and she can only point out a lie when asked by a commissioner – she cannot initiate revealing that a testimony is a lie.

Can you imagine if you had this talent and were asked to sit in on, say, a famous trial or political rally. And you had to sit there and watch someone commit perjury, lie to the jury through their teeth, and you couldn’t say anything because the judge didn’t ask you if they were lying. You can imagine Shelby’s dilemma.

And it gets worse. It becomes apparent to the defendants that something is up. The communal members keep looking at Shelby then redirecting their line of questioning as if they know the defendant is lying. I won’t reveal everything that happens. But let me just say, there is rule in the theatre that you don’t bring a gun onstage unless you plan to use it; and Paul doesn’t introduce a concert pianist sister with impressively strong hands without planning to use that fact. The ending is amazing.

I was thinking last night for some reason, what three books I would choose to best convey what living in New York in the 1980s was like for me.⁴ This was one. Much of the book takes place in New York and, for some reason, it just feels like New York in the 1980s felt to me. I don’t know if it’s the abysmally losing Jets⁵, the total 80s-vibe loser attitude of Shelby’s husband, or the very real frustration that Shelby feels being a woman who wasn’t being asked for the answers when she had them, or watching girlfriends change themselves for a man, just a little, just this one thing to keep the peace, just once more because marriage is about compromise, until there’s nothing left to change because there’s nothing left of her but a shadow of her former self, who quietly fades away.⁶

I think this book is only available used or in e-book form now but it’s worth the search because this book is really fun to read (and a quick read, with very short chapters, only 5 or so pages per chapter.) I have to say that I hate the cover above. If this was the cover when I bought the book, I would not have bought it. Whomever is designing these covers is crazy – a few times, I’ve scoured the web for pictures of covers from older editions of books because the newer editions has a cover like that one. Blech.

So buy the book despite the cover.

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1. She has to have those hand-exercise things, the kind you squeeze to improve your hand muscles, made specially for her, because the ones on the market aren’t enough of a challenge for her anymore. ↩︎
2. He’s PR manager for the Jets. ↩︎
3. Original copyright 1980. But have things changed all that much? ↩︎
4. The other two were something by Cynthia Heimel, maybe If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? or Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Goodbye. And something by Sparkle Hayter, maybe Revenge of the Cootie Girls. But then I realized those were both from the 1990s and by the 1990s I was wearing good-girl A-line skirts and white short-sleeved blouses that buttoned up to the neck and had embroidery on their plackets and pumps, gold pumps, but pumps nonetheless with neutral nylons no matter how hot the day was – an outfit I could replicate in five different variations because there were no casual Fridays in the 1990s – and sitting at my desk all day rewriting policy manuals and trying to figure out how to purchase shopping bags more economically. So maybe I was thinking of the 90s not the 80s… ↩︎
5. Nonunique to the 80s, alas. ↩︎
6. Don’t do it, grrrl! ↩︎