Book Review: The Square Root of Murder

The Square Root of Murder by Ada Madison
ISBN:  978-0-425-24219-3

The Square Root of Murder is the first in the new cozy mystery series with a mathematics theme, the Professor Sophie Knowles Mystery series.  The series centers on mathematics professor Dr. Knowles at a small private college in Massachusetts.

This book has both good and bad points.  The main characters, namely Sophie, her boyfriend Bruce, the police detective Virgil, and her girlfriend Ariana, are all believable and adequately written.  I feel the characters lacked some depth, but perhaps this will come in future books.  Also, the characters were a bit predictable. The plot was interesting with a surprising ending.  Occasionally the story did lag a bit, but not enough to encourage me to give up on the book.  The writing was fine -- typical of cozy mysteries -- neither poor nor great.

One disappointment was the lack of math.  Yes, I'm not typical because I do understand higher mathematics, but I had expected a few references to some math.  The only real math mentioned is the fact that Dr. Knowles creates math puzzles for magazines (and based on this a few puzzles are included at that end of the book).

Still, this was a fun book to read and I will move on to #2 in the series.