| This fantasy/horror/romance novel features as its protagonist a young, female math professor at UC-Berkeley who gets caught up in a battle with a demon when she finds an unusual deck of tarot cards in Egypt. Like the only other official "paperback romance" on my list, this book is especially notable for its misconception of what a mathematician does. I suppose this one is a bit better than the mathematician who handles finances for a millionaire in Miscalculations, but I still feel the need to address it.
I am very sympathetic to the misconception that mathematics is a closed book, that we already know all the math there is, that math is just obvious like "2+2". I'm sympathetic because I still remember thinking of it that way. The fact is, however, math is more like research science. It takes lots of hard work for us to invent (like the lightbulb) and discover (like gravity) mathematics. If not for the mathematicians doing this work in the past, we would not know much more now than "2+2". And, there are many people employed as research mathematicians today. As the book correctly portrays, professors at Berkeley and even here at the College of Charleston have research programs. Though Patricia Simpson describes Rae as having research in the book, her research is about the past ("how did mathematics affect the culture of ancient Egypt?").
I assure you, the math professors at UC-Berkeley are not studying the math of the past, they are creating the math of the future! (That sounds a bit too melodramatic...doesn't it? Sorry.)
Anyway, other than that, I can only say that this book is what you would expect. If you are interested in fantasy combined with the standard "romance genre", you may well enjoy this book. I did not particularly like it, but I'm sure I am not in the intended audience demographic either!
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