Murder by the Numbers

THE OXFORD MURDERS, by Guillermo Martinez, translated by Sonia Soto.

The best crime fiction, as I've said often, lights up landscapes both exterior and interior. Martinez is a novelist from Argentina who combines – in person and in his latest work – a fascination with mathematics and murder. Is the violent death of an old woman in the British university city of Oxford connected in some way with a highly-lauded study of a particular form of discipline called logical series? And is it the first of a series of death which might just be putting the study to its ultimate test?