Guillermo Martinez, The Oxford Murders

The Oxford Murders

Guillermo Martinez

Penguin, Sep 2006, $13.00

ISBN: 014303796X

The twenty-two-year-old Argentine math student finds the smothered corpse of his elderly landlady, Mrs. Eagleton; the police assume a relative did the deed. However, at the same time that the woman was murdered, Oxford logician Arthur Seldom, author of a book on the mathematics of serial killers, receives an enigmatic note that implies this homicide is the first of a series linked by a strange pattern with Mrs. Eagleton representing the circle. The nameless student informs his professor what he found.

Death number two occurs in a nearby hospital and the third one at an outdoor concert. However, as Seldom and his Argentine assistant dig closer to the mathematical pattern behind the serial killing, a seemingly unrelated bus crash kills ten Downs Syndrome children; the mass murderer in that horrifying incident is the bus driver, who apparently was seeking useful lungs for a transplant for his dying daughter. However, Seldom sees a link to the mathematical serial killer making him wonder if a third party might be manipulating everyone, including him, by bringing chaos, perhaps Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, or Wittgenstein's paradox into the geometrical pattern of the serial killer.

Math, murder, and mayhem -- what more can a reader ask for? The storyline is fast-paced with the mathematical theories delightfully explained (in short prose) as part of solving the whodunit. Seldom and the unnamed narrator-student assistant are fully three-dimensional characters. However, what makes THE OXFORD MURDERS a brilliant cerebral mystery is the core underlying philosophy that even homicides (especially in literature) contain patterns, though these may be psychologically falsely forced to cause the reality of chaos to become acceptable as no one likes a vacuum.

Harriet Klausner