| Things seem to be going well for Vera at the start of Chuck Tingle's "Lucky Day". She is the youngest math/stats professor at the University of Chicago whose first book has just been published and she is about to announce her engagement. Moreover, quite improbably, Vera's fiance finds a "lucky penny" on the street which seems to be one from Vera's childhood coin collection. However, things soon take a turn for the worse, not just for Vera but the entire world. It goes down in infamy as the "Low-Probability Event" (LPE), a day on which eight million people died in horrific and extremely improbable ways.
Most of the story takes place four years later when Vera is recruited to work for the LPEC, a government agency which is investigating connections between the LPE and the very strange casino which was the subject of her book. There is much discussion of statistics and probability, most but not all of which involving casino games. Before the LPE, Vera displays some of the characteristics of being a stereotypical mathematician character, such as being organized almost to the point of OCD. (After the LPE she is broken and unmotivated.) Vera's "theory" to explain what is going on ends up involving the butterfly effect (name-dropping Lorenz) and "true nothingness" which can only be found in the "sterile vacuum of mathematics". Otherwise, there isn't much math to report in this novel.
This is not the only work of mathematical fiction about laws of probability going haywire. See, for example, Conservation of Probability, The Devil You Don't, The Gigantic Fluctuation, The Law, Luck be a Lady, Probability Storm, A Very Good Year,
and The Year of the Jackpot.
[FWIW The mysterious author who uses the pseudonym "Chuck Tingle" is known for writing queer literature and gory horror. This novel is no exception. In that opening chapter of the book, before the LPE, Vera "comes out" as a lesbian to her mother, who has the usual "you're not really gay...it's just a phase" reaction. The deaths that soon follow, including the death of her mother, a friend, and lots of strangers, are described in horrific and disturbingly bloody detail. The interaction with her mother is paralleled later in the book when she tells an LPEC agent (who happens to be gay) that she is bisexual, and he insists that "nobody is really bi". More gory deaths soon follow.]
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