title: The Dobie Paradox
author:  Desmond Cory 
description: Math whiz and extremely absentminded professor John Dobie and his best girl, Dr. Kate Coyle, find murder in a "loony bin" in their latest appearance (following The Mask of Zeus ) in Cory's bold and witty series. Assembled at the Tongwynlais Rehabilation Centre near Cardiff are various substance-addicted souls, including a famous author who has asked Dobie to vouch for his worthiness. Of course, there are legions within and without academia who strongly doubt Dobie's sanity, not to mention the Welsh police who have understandably ambiguous responses to his canny solutions of nasty murders. Next to the Centre is the fancy girl's school where the promiscuous Beverly Sutro, whom Dobie and Kate find near death on the side of the road, was a student. Beverly has unexplained amounts of money, a lover (or possibly a client) and a dysfunctional family with strong ties to organized crime. Dobie has a puzzle, in which the pieces are the Centre's infiltrated computer system, his author friend's hynosis-induced dreams of Beverly and the cryptic note in the girl's pocket. Dobie, who has trouble remembering friends' names and operating an automobile, is a wizard with computers and cryptic notes. In the hands of a lesser talent than Cory's, Dobie would be a joke rather than what he is: a fresh, comic presence with an uncanny ability to lure readers into his weird yet oddly logical world. <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  THE SHY TRAFFICKERS
  
  Desmond Cory
  
  Copyright © Desmond Cory 2015
  
  In the Professor Dobie series:
  
  THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR (also published as THE CATALYST)
  
  THE MASK OF ZEUS
  
  THE DOBIE PARADOX
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  1
  
  There was a wooden table and there were two wooden chairs and Jackson sat on
  one wooden chair and the fat man sat on the other and there was a smell of
  carbolic soap and a pale sun was shafting through the barred window and the
  whole scene was so boringly familiar and so redolent of the prose style of the
  late Ernest Hemingway that Jackson found himself lapsing swiftly into a not
  unpleasing somnolence, broken into only by occasional faint and distant noises
  that sounded like the twanging of a plaintive banjo down on the old plantation
  but surely couldn’t be, given that in point of fact he wasn’t at that point in
  time way down south in Dixie but way out west in bloody Cardiff and moreover
  seated on a (plaguily hard) chair in one of H.M. prisons and, and, and …
  Hmmmmm. Yes