The Oxford Murders

Marilyn Stasio

While it helps to have some passing knowledge of Wittgenstein's finite rule paradox or Fermat's last theorem, anyone who loves a good mystery can share the quest for "that merciful calm, that singular mental balm - apparent order within chaos - that comes as you follow the steps of a theorem."
— The New York Times

Rosemary Herbert

Dorothy L. Sayers herself could not have better characterized the denizens of a Common Room. This book may not win first-class honors, but those who love a mystery mixed with a portrait of academic life should not miss The Oxford Murders.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Math and murder mingle in this intriguingly cerebral mystery. When an Argentine math student at Oxford discovers the smothered body of his landlady, conventional wisdom points to a family member with the most prosaic of motives. But then renowned logician Arthur Seldom, author of a book on the mathematics of serial killers, tells of a strange note left in his mailbox indicating the murder is the first of a series linked by a mysterious pattern. More bodies pile up, apparently of natural causes, but each paired with a message bearing a new arcane symbol. Arthur and his student ponder whether the deaths are innocent or the subtle, "imperceptible" homicides of a madman seeking to match wits with the great logician, and they rack their brains to decipher a pattern behind the signs before another corpse turns up. Martinez, a novelist and math Ph.D., writes with a restrained, elegant style sprinkled with brief disquisitions on Gadel's theorem, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Wittgenstein's paradox, which demonstrates "the impossibility of establishing an unambiguous rule." None of that helps very much in solving the crimes, but it makes an intriguing context for the author's exploration of a fundamental mystery theme-how we impose meaningful patterns on the confusing evidence of reality and are in turn misled and blinded by those patterns. The result is a stylish, intellectually meaty whodunit. (Oct. 17) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An elegant, fashionable, award-winning novel mixes murder with modern mathematical theory. A nameless, 22-year-old Argentinean mathematician plays Dr. Watson to mathematical genius Arthur Seldom's Sherlock Holmes in contemporary Oxford, England. Mart'nez (Regarding Roderer, 1994, etc.), a mathematical scientist himself, takes an offbeat approach to the place and the killings, adding intellectual spin to his renderings of both. Each of the "imperceptible murders" that takes place involves an acquaintance of Seldom or else occurs in close proximity to him, and each is preceded by a message and a symbol taken from the Pythagorean doctrine. The unnamed narrator-whose landlady, Mrs Eagleton, is victim number one, her symbol a circle-helps Seldom investigate the mysteries, while moving through well known locations such as Blenheim Palace and the Radcliffe Hospital, which here take on foreign, vaguely surreal and sinister aspects. Female interest is supplied by a lusty, tennis-playing nurse and Mrs. Eagleton's miserable but alluring granddaughter Beth, with Mart'nez smoothly melding the intrigue and sex with introductions to loftier intellectual concepts such as Fermat's Last Theorem. A second death takes place in the hospital and the third, spectacularly, at an outdoor concert. Bizarrely, all three victims seem to have been living on borrowed time. But the pattern of violence changes, culminating in a macabre bus crash that kills ten Down Syndrome children, and seems to have been engineered by the bus's driver, now dead himself, in order to generate lung transplant material for his dying daughter. Was he the serial killer, or is it possible there were two murderers and some nifty connectivefootwork supplied by a third party? The narrator is left to muse on what constitutes the perfect crime, and also to contemplate his own random influence on events in a story that fuses murder, numbers, beautiful minds, sects and old mysteries. Soft-spoken, smart and satisfying.