From A SECRET HISTORY to THE RULE OF FOUR, the halls of higher ed have proven fertile ground as settings for high-minded mystery. Add to that hallowed list Argentinean author Guillermo Martínez’s THE OXFORD MURDERS.

Our unnamed narrator arrives in Oxford for graduate work in mathematics, renting a room from the kindly, elderly, wheelchair-bound Mrs. Eagleton. He doesn’t get much of an opportunity to know her beyond a dinner and a game of Scrabble because she soon is found murdered. Making this crime even more peculiar, notes family friend and math legend Arthur Seldom, is that word of it arrived in advance, via a letter adorned with a time, an address and a bizarre symbol.

Seldom believes the symbol has mathematical origins – a theory that bears weight when more murders occur, each with its own note and another symbol. These scrawlings suggest a series; our protagonists reason if they can predict the next symbol, perhaps the mystery can be solved without further fatalities.

OXFORD has a lot going for it beyond its clever premise. Through Sonia Soto’s simple translation, Martínez paints a rich portrait of academic life in the UK. Its touch of newly adult angst amidst such a dangerous backdrop reminded me of Jon Fasman’s excellent THE GEOGRAPHER’S LIBRARY, minus the twin narratives and ever-wide scope. But the intricate trail of clues is there, along with the narrator falling for wounded women, and a climax that at first seems anticlimactic, but soon reveals more layers.

All in all, it’s a nice, compact thriller, remarkably thrift in less than 200 pages. In an age when so many authors overwrite, it’s refreshing to see a novel – and a complex mystery, no less – that says what it needs to say and gets out. My only complaint? Early on, Seldom poses a riddle for our narrator that takes him a while to solve; apparently the answer is very entertaining, but we’re not shared the solution and I must not be that smart to figure it out. (An Internet search eventually turned up the answer, but still.) For its brevity and bravery, OXFORD gets an A minus. –Rod Lott

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