Thursday, June 5, 2008
The Oxford Murders

Murder mysteries normally keep me enthralled from start to finish and while this was a good book I can honestly say nothing about it was enthralling.

The Oxford Murders, written by Guillermo Martinez, focused on the deaths of three people who were all already dying. The deaths appeared to be of natural causes but it turns out they were murdered by someone who wanted it to look natural. A smart someone.

You go through the entire book following the thoughts of the detective and the narrator. Our narrator is a student of math named Martin, from Argentina. Arthur Seldom, good friends with the narrator, received a series of notes which were meant to be warnings of a murder. Each note had a symbol which he claimed could be a mathematical challenge. Seldom being a mathematical genius, received these notes because in his recently published book he had a chapter on serial killers and how they can be "calculated" just like a math problem.

I found this thought process to be quite intriguing. I am not good at math and don't know much about theorems and such. This book discusses many mathematical symbols and the theories behind them. As I read along I realized just how smart the serial killer in the book really was and it added a sort of heightened fear to the mix.

***SPOILER***

So when it turned out that all the murders were separate and not a serial murderer at all I was sort of disappointed. Each murder was explained and one of them really wasn't a murder at all.

Plus, I was troubled by the bus crash which killed ten children who had Downs Syndrome. The bus driver died as well and it was he who planned out the bus crash. His daughter was in the hospital dying and on the top of a list for a lung transplant. He contemplated committing suicide so she could have his lung, but he found out they do not transplant the organs of people who have killed themselves. So he orchestrated a bus crash. It's very sad.

I'd give The Oxford Murders 3 stars out of 5. If you are not interested in reading you can watch the movie, Elijah Wood plays Martin. It was an international film released in Spain earlier this year. [trailer]

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