The Oxford MurdersOkay, I didn’t like this one. But I think that part of the failing is mine, not the book’s.

“The Oxford Murders” was originally written in Spanish, and I’m ashamed to say that I could not get past that. The entire time I was reading it I kept thinking, “That’s kind of a strange way to phrase that. Was that Martinez or the translator Sonia Soto?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read translated books before - I can’t exactly read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in its original Czech. (Side note on T.U.L.O.B.: What was with the bowler hat?) I don’t know why I couldn’t let it drop this time.

But even aside from that, “The Oxford Murders” won’t get a permanent place on my over-stressed bookcase. At 197 pages, it’s a short mystery. The unnamed narrator (pretentious!) is an Argentinian graduate student in mathematics studying for a year at Oxford University. His landlady ends up dead in the first of what appears to be a string of murders based on the beliefs of an ancient mathematical society. Unnamed Narrator works with one of his personal heroes, a famous Oxford logician, to try to anticipate the next murder in the series.

Okay, it sounds a little bit DaVinci-Code. What can I say, there was a 2-for-3 book sale at Barnes & Noble. However, instead of being brain candy, it kept whipping out passages like this:

My hypothesis is that it is profoundly linked to the aesthetic that has been promulgated down the ages and has been, essentially, unchanging. There is no Kantian forcing, but an aesthetic of simplicity and elegance which also guides the formulation of conjectures; mathematicians believe that the beauty of a theorem requires certain divine proportions between the simplicity of the axioms at the starting point, and the simplicity of the thesis at the point of arrival. The awkward, tricky part has always been the path between the two - the proof. And as long as that aesthetic is maintained there is no reason for undecidable propositions to appear “naturally.”

The eventual solution to this mystery was not cool enough to justify making me read 197 pages of this.

Verdict: 4 out of 10. Much like with Dan Brown, I enjoyed a few of the researched tidbits about ancient math brotherhoods, but that was about it.