The Quotient of Murder
Ada Madison

Genre:
Mystery
Rating:

Dr. Sophie Knowles loves using puzzles to make math fun for students. But when winter seizes Henley College, she must thaw out a cold case to track down a killer—her most difficult puzzle yet . . .

Winter Intersession is in full swing, and campus is buzzing over the concert celebrating the bell tower’s reopening. The building has been shuttered for twenty-five years, and Sophie’s shocked to learn why—a student leapt from it to her death. But she’s even more troubled by the secrecy surrounding the case. After Sophie performs some quick calculations, she’s left with a nagging question: Was it really suicide?

When one of Sophie’s favorite students, a performer in the concert, is brutally beaten and left in a coma, Sophie’s mind kicks into overdrive. The horrific incidents seem too coincidental to be unrelated, but can Sophie put together the pieces from a twenty-five-year-old murder before any other students get hurt?

Review

For fans of:  Casey Mayes

Dr. Sophie Knowles is a bit grumpy about having to teach a class during Henley College’s January Intercession; campus is cold and boring this time of year, and the rest of the collegiate world is still on winter break. Sophie and her fellow professors yearn for a little excitement to help them pass the time, but then a young female student is found beaten and left for dead near one of the campus dorms, and Sophie starts to realize that thrills aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. With the perpetrator still at large, nobody at Henley feels safe. Can Sophie and her students work together to help the police bring Jenn’s attacker to justice, or is one of them destined to become the next victim?

The Quotient of Murder is fourth of Ada Madison’s Professor Sophie Knowles Mysteries. My first exposure to this series was the second installment, The Probability of Murder, and I absolutely loved it, so to say I had high hopes for The Quotient of Murder would be an understatement. I’m sad to report, however, that Madison’s latest fell well short of my expectations. The setup is clunky, and the book is littered with exposition and awkward info dumps.  The pace is slow, and thanks to vast swaths of text that do absolutely nothing to forward the plot, I frequently found my attention wandering. And while Madison certainly knows math and physics, it’s clear she isn’t well acquainted with the modern college student. Characters who should be in their late teens to early 20s read like junior high school students, sapping the story of gravitas and verisimilitude.

Things do pick up during the back half of the book, which gave me hope that The Quotient of Murder might redeem itself; for about fifty pages there, it seems as though Madison’s crime might be both clever and expertly crafted. Then, though, Madison shoots straight past clever and winds up with a mystery so convoluted it strains credulity. Sophie’s approach to the investigation is scattershot and illogical – particularly for a math professor who prides herself on her puzzle-solving skills, and Madison uses a shocking amount of hand waving to explain how Sophie and her fellow sleuths arrive at their solution. The end result is a tough and relatively unrewarding slog.

Reviewed by Kat