| Like the author of this murder mystery, protagonist India Hayes is a librarian at a small midwestern college. Presumably unlike the author, Hayes must prove the innocence of her mathematician brother when he is accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend before she marries another man.
There is not much math to discuss here. The brother displays signs of being a typically insensitive and obsessed mathematician on the very first page when he calls his sister at 6AM on the morning of July 4th to ask her to look up Yang-Mills Theory for him.
This one reference is the only mathematical detail. Otherwise, we hear repeatedly how the brother became interested in mathematics in college as a way of getting over his love for the woman who is later to become the murder victim:
| (quoted from Maid of Murder)
[He] comforted himself with the black-and-white world of mathematics and dedicated the same obsessive energy he had in pursuing Olivia to solving story problems I had no way of deciphering.
|
Despite his apparent effort, he is unable to complete his PhD thesis and so becomes a perennial graduate student. Eventually, we learn that he does not actually like mathematics:
| (quoted from Maid of Murder)
That was my first thought, thank God. Because the next day I knew that I wouldn't have to go back to the hole in the basement of Dexler or pound equations into apathetic freshman heads or create some useless theorem so I could publish my dissertation.
|
So, though this book may be fine as a mystery, the author really has no particular appreciation for mathematics and nothing to say about it beyond making use of the negative stereotypes of the field and its practitioners. | 
