Though I can’t get quite as excited about this one as I did last year’s Run No More, I’m happy to report that in Shadows All Around Her, Catherine Mulvany once again delivers a well written, intricately plotted, and intelligent tale of romantic suspense.

As a birthday present from her stepfather attending a conference in Edinburgh, college math instructor Caitlin O’Shaughnessy receives a rare set of John Napier’s “bones”, an early sort of calculator built by the subject of Caitlin’s dissertation. Along with the prized “bones”, Caitlin also discovers an old manuscript in the package. Though she is puzzled by the significance of the manuscript and mystified even further by the fact that it’s not mentioned in her stepfather’s enclosed note, Caitlin fails to make the association between the manuscript and a mysterious attack she manages to narrowly escape.

Matters take a turn from the worse when Caitlin receives a call from Edinburgh. The caller, a relation of her stepfather by the name of Dominic Fortune, informs her that her stepfather is missing. The understandably worried Caitlin, along with her close friend Bree, catches the next flight to Scotland.

Of course, Dominic Fortune is devastatingly sexy. But what the reader knows – and Caitlin doesn’t – is that Dominic is more than a wealthy and well-connected dilettante. The millionaire “playboy” is also a supersecret intelligence operative for the Mediterranean island of Calix who has reasons of his own for wanting to find Caitlin’s stepfather and the important manuscript he doesn’t know is in Caitlin’s possession.

The story here involves myth and magic, along with a sort of James Bond-ian kind of spy stuff and, for the most part, it works. Caitlin is a likable and intrepid heroine and Dominic a suave and sexy Euro-hero. Regretfully, however, the secondary cast is peopled virtually entirely by characters you’ve met more than once – make that w-a-a-a-y more than once. As for the plot itself, I made some pretty sound guesses about where matters were going and I think readers who’ve picked up more than a few novels of romantic suspense might do the same. Still, getting there was predominantly a satisfying experience.

What worked less well for me were a few . . . well, let’s call them inconsistencies. For one thing, Caitlin is sick with worry over her stepfather in the book’s early chapters, but seems to have a little too much fun with Dominic in the latter ones. I can buy sex to forget, sex to cling to life, sex to relieve stress – I’ve got no problem with any of that – but Caitlin’s exuberance seems off kilter and the concerns for her stepfather once so paramount pretty much forgotten. Secondly, Shadows All Around Her features a cutesy scene in which Caitlin ties up and leaves the lover she’s just learned is married. Now, this works on Nip/Tuck when the tie-er is a bimbo pissed off at her Duke of Slut lover, I have bigger problems when we’re talking about a college professor with hang ups about men.

And, though I’m not a frequent rant-er, allow me a small one here: Why is that authors use a female character’s (and it’s always a woman’s) need to watch her weight as shorthand for narcissim or villainy or shallowness? Case in point: As Dominic watches super-thin Caitlin voraciously consume a meal, he muses about how, despite the food she is so happily inhaling, Caitlin weighs twenty pound less than his calorie-and-carb-counting ex-girlfriend. Well, sir, just about all I’ve got to say to that is, “how nice for her”, as I mentally send dear, thin, hearty-eater Caitlin a mental raspberry.

Though I don’t hesitate in giving Shadows All Around Her a firm endorsement, I have to admit to some disappointment. In 2004 Catherine Mulvany smashed just about all the rules in the fantastic Run No More and, sad to say, the undeniable truth is that this one is a far more conventional book. Nevertheless, though Ms. Mulvany delivers a far less genre-busting book here, she’s also produced a good one that dedicated readers of romantic suspense won’t want to miss.