Last week, on his Between the Covers interview, Robert Ferrigno announced a contest for NRO readers involving his new novel, Sins of the Assassins. It includes a minor reference to an NRO contributor–readers were asked to name the NRO contributor and identify the page number. Robert just sent this report:

The winner of the “Find the NRO regular contributor in SINS OF THE ASSASSIN” contest is Jan Tindall from Vestavia Hills, Alabama, who picked out the line “I call it a Derbyshire star, after an old-days mathematician” on page 148. Jan, who beat out the next contestant by 47 minutes, will receive all three volumes of the Assassin trilogy (signed, first editions) when the third book is published spring, 2009. The next five runnerups will receive an Advanced Readers Edition of the third book next year. ARCs are deluxe paperbacks printed before publication and sent to reviewers, so you five will get an early read. I’d like to thank all the Corner readers who responded, and apologize for waiting so long to post the results, but I was on book tour. By the way, I have no idea if the Derbyshire star described in the book is geometrically accurate. In college, I satisfied my math requirement with a course titled — no joke — Mathematics for Humanities Majors. I got a B.

Robert’s homepage is here.