[I received an electronic review copy of this book from Netgalley and Henry Holt and Co. in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.]
Summary
Years ago, mathematician Grant McAllister posited a math theory about literature, specifically murder mysteries. He privately published the theory along with a book of seven short mysteries to illustrate his ideas called The White Murders.
Julia Hart is working for a small publishing house that wants to re-publish the book for a wider audience. So she’s tracked Grant down and traveled to his seaside cottage to talk through the stories in the book in order to prepare them for publication.
Except Julia has noticed some oddities and inconsistencies in the stories. She’s hoping Grant will be able to explain them to her. Maybe they are the innocent errors of a writing novice. Or maybe there’s a connection to an unsolved murder from over 20 years ago.
Review
The book launches with the first short story in The White Murders before introducing readers to Julia and Grant in chapter 2. The rest of the book toggles back and forth between the short stories and Julia’s work on the manuscript.
Honestly, I felt the short stories were more engaging than the larger story of the novel which is the Grant/Julia piece. If I was rating the short stories alone, I’d give them 4 stars. But the Julia/Grant portion was maybe a 2 star read on it’s own. So my overall rating for the book is an average of the two.
The Julia and Grant story never clicked for me. There wasn’t a lot of time in the book for readers to really get a feel for the characters. It’s a lot of Julia pushing and probing for information Grant doesn’t want to give and him telling her how little he remembers of the stories in the book. And the math pieces of this – Venn diagrams, sets and subsets – felt so basic (as far as “math” goes). Even the application to mysteries – killers and suspects and victims and detectives – wasn’t much of a revelation. It was a stretch for me to think this work was anything “significant” enough to warrant a first book much less a republication. There ARE twists to this part of the book, but they weren’t enough to elevate my enjoyment of it, and in some ways they undercut my enjoyment of the short stories. That said, I DID enjoy the short stories, though some were more violent/gruesome than I usually read.
This one is a mixed bag for me. Come for the short stories. If they work for you, awesome. I think you can easily just read the short stories – they are basically every other chapter of the book. If you like the short stories enough to stick around for the larger story, good for you. You will have some twists and turns in store. (LGBTQ+)
Rating: ♥♥♥*
*♥♥♥ = “Solid/Fine”
