Faye Kellerman’s new mystery novel, The Theory of Death, brings to mind the famous quote by Sir Walter Scott:
“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!”
In the small upstate New York town of Greenbury, former LAPD lieutenant Peter Decker catches a troubling case.
A young man is found naked in the woods, the apparent victim of suicide.
But until the coroner calls it, Decker has to treat it as a suspicious death, and no one is off limits in this investigation.
Just as he’s about to start sleuthing, Decker gets a lucky break.
Tyler McAdams, a privileged, former cop with the Greenbury police department, calls him.
Now a Harvard law student, McAdams is nearing exam time and needs a quiet place to study and crash.
Having a soft spot for McAdams, Decker and his wife Rina agree.
No sooner does McAdams catch wind of the recent death in Greenbury, than he abandons his studies and unofficially enters the world of police work again. Despite Decker’s protestations, McAdams throws himself into the case and becomes an asset to the investigation.
The corpse turns out to be Elijah Wolf, a student at the small Kneed Loft College, where he was studying a very esoteric branch of mathematics.
It’s here that Kellerman shows off all her writerly research, impressing the reader with definitions of “Fourier analysis”, “eigenvectors”, and “stochastic oscillator index.”
There’s a bit of overkill in this area if you ask me, but it is relevant to the plot.
And just when you thought you were going to encounter a bunch of math nerds, instead you meet a conniving coven of super-geniuses, who carefully guard their work, lest a fellow student (or professor) steal their theories.
Kneed Loft is in no way synonymous with the hallowed halls of learning, but rather, it morphs into a viper’s nest of cunning, Machiavellian academics harboring brilliantly paranoid students.
Bottom line: the plot moves along at a swift clip, the suspense rates about a seven on the Richter scale, and most of the characters are well-articulated misfits in one way or another.
Kellerman’s deft hand with dialogue creates an entertaining whodunit that you won’t want to miss.
They ruled it suicide and murder, but if you ask me, the cause of death was academics.
For other popular reading suggestions check out Richmond Public Library’s Web site at www.yourlibrary.ca/goodbooks/.
Shelley Civkin is the communications officer at the Richmond Public Library.
