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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | MYSTERY ROS | Searching... Unknown |
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Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Textbook author Rosen's promising first novel deftly mixes mathematical puzzles, international intrigue, social upheaval, and religious zealotry. When 30-year-old math genius James Fenster is blown up in his Amsterdam hotel room, via the precise detonation of military-grade rocket fuel, shortly before he was due to address a World Trade Organization conference, Henri Poincare, aging Interpol agent and great-grandson of a legendary mathematician, investigates. Suspicion at first falls on Fenster's former fiancee, a demure antiques dealer, but the trail soon leads Poincare to a militant Christian millennial group, a Peruvian economics professor on a terrorist watch list, a malevolent mutual-fund executive, a Balkan genocide case decidedly not buried in the past, and a brilliant graduate student of the deceased. A surprising series of personal relationships and connections prove to have all the logic of chaos theory. While the plot has its glitches and dead spots, readers, especially the mathematically inclined, will relish this intellectually provocative whodunit. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This startling novel opens on an aging Interpol agent taking his heart medicine and thinking of retirement. But Henri Poincare can't resist one more case. A mathematician is killed in a puzzling explosion in an Amsterdam hotel. On the verge of proving an elaborate version of string theory demonstrating that everything is connected, the victim was beginning to attract unsavory types convinced the new theory could be used to predict market highs and lows. So far, so great. This is a thoughtful, beautifully written puzzle, and its unraveling is handled very skillfully. Along the way, though, Rosen goes a bit overboard with ancillary material. Do we really need photos of cracks in concrete and veins in leaves, plus a printout of Poincare's EKG? Still, this first in a series starring the wily Poincare offers a fine look at a good cop doing his job. The plot, drawing on math and religion, should attract fans of such cerebral thrillers as Arturo Sangalli's Pythagoras' Revenge (2009) and Michael Gregorio's Critique of Criminal Reason (2006).--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Wouldn't it be nice, Leonard Rosen asks in his first novel, ALL CRY CHAOS (Permanent Press, $29), if the broken world we live in could be mended by the application of some universal mathematical formula? James Fenster, a Harvard professor who's in Amsterdam to deliver a paper before the World Trade Organization, has been working on that very thing. But before he can deliver his remarks on "The Mathematical Inevitability of a One-World Economy," a bomb charged with rocket fuel delivers a surgical strike on his hotel room. Henri Poincaré, a veteran Interpol agent, seems the ideal man to investigate the murder, since he's the great-grandson of the mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré and something of a brain himself. "So who kills a mathematician, other than another mathematician?" his young protégé wants to know. Poincaré turns up some promising candidates, one of them a financier who funded some of Fenster's work in hopes of applying it to the stock market, another a brilliant economist turned political provocateur. There's even a group of religious fundamentalists intent on creating the chaos that would hasten the Second Coming. With the exception of the victim's former fiancée, whose suspicious behavior has also made her a person of interest, these suspects are all sold on the idea that "human behavior can be modeled mathematically, just as any complex, dynamic system in nature can be modeled." Rosen has a fine detective in Poincaré, whose supple mind can wrap itself around the more abstract implications of Fenster's theories, including the notion that proof of a grand architectural design underneath all the world's chaos might argue for the existence of a grand architect. But this thoughtful detective is constantly being pulled off the case, pressed into strenuous action by an overwrought thriller subplot. If someone hadn't bumped off Fenster, he might have found a mathematical solution for unifying this fractured plot. Guido Guerrieri, the amiable protagonist of a series of legal mysteries by Gianrico Carofiglio, doesn't inspire much confidence as a criminal investigator, but he's wonderful company on late-night walks through the city of Bari, Italy, brooding on lost loves and misspent lives and all those other sad subjects men obsess about during a midlife crisis. In TEMPORARY PERFECTIONS (Rizzoli Ex Libris, $24.95), this criminal defense lawyer must find a solid legal argument to keep the police from closing the file on a missing college student. Taking guidance from the detectives in crime novels, he educates himself in investigative procedures, only to lose his head over the pretty college girls he interviews. Carofiglio's writing also has its entertaining quirks, in Antony Shugaar's idiomatic translation. Long passages are devoted to memorable but extraneous characters like the taxi driver who keeps a library in his cab. But wherever it strays, the narrative keeps coming back to Guerrieri and the thoughts that rattle around in his head, often spilling out before he can stop them. "Atlanta had a long history of spree and serial murders," Amanda Kyle Williams reminds us in her first suspense novel, THE STRANGER YOU SEEK (Bantam, $25). So the lunatic met here - a disciplined sadist who sends taunting letters to the police - fits right in. While bounty hunters don't normally get involved in murder cases, Keye Street, the smart and competent protagonist, was once an F.B.I. profiler (and has a personal relationship with the lead investigator), which qualifies her as a consultant. Williams handles crime scene procedures with assurance, uses forthright language to portray a frightful killer and isn't above injecting a bit of Southern humor into a grim situation. But Keye provides the heartbeat of this novel. While she isn't very impressive as a profiler, she's terrific when going about her day job: listening to the whining of a crooked accountant, stuffing herself with home cooking on a trip to the country to find a missing cow or just dreaming up clever ways to serve a summons. The Spanish city of Valencia looks dazzling in Jason Webster's first novel, OR THE BULL KILLS YOU (Minotaur, $24.99), which opens just before the "pyromaniac spring fiesta" known as Fallas and swiftly moves into the bull ring. Chief Inspector Max Cámara hates bullfighting, but this civilized cop becomes immersed in its dramatic rituals and divisive history when someone murders a celebrated young matador. Even as the violence escalates and the symbolism thickens, the estimable Inspector Cámara remains open-minded, if a bit cynical about the grand follies of his beautiful city. People like D. E. Johnson must dream about traveling back to the beginning of the last century just to ride in a big Hupmobile roadster or a sleek Pierce-Arrow touring car or maybe a luxurious Detroit Electric coupe. In Johnson's second historical novel, MOTOR CITY SHAKEDOWN (Minotaur, $24.99), Will Anderson, whose father owns the Anderson Electric Car Company, has his eye on the Torpedo runabout that his friend Edsel Ford personally modified in his father's factory. The storytelling is a bit crude in this boyish adventure, which tosses Will into a brutal gang war, fought over unionizing the auto industry. But the scenes of the Motor City, riding high on the industrial wave, are extraordinarily vivid - and best viewed from the front seat of one of those very snazzy cars. 'Who kills a mathematician,' asks a young Interpol agent, 'other than another mathematician?'
Kirkus Review
Calling all fans of fractals, international-criminal conspiracies and the End of Days: Your ship has come in.Is it just a coincidence that someone, acting with surgical precision, has bombed the Amsterdam hotel room of Harvard mathematician James Fenster, author of the paper "The Inevitability of a One-World Economy," shortly after a suicide bomber of the self-anointed Soldiers of Rapture has blown up himself and five innocents in Milan and a much-loved gang counselor is shot to death in Barcelona, a Scriptural passage pinned to her corpse? Interpol Inspector Henri Poincar, the namesake whose great-grandfather, mathematician and physicist, was one of the pioneers of relativity theory, thinks not. He's convinced that the key to Fenster's death lies in his work on fractals, patterns that repeat themselves from microscopic to planetary levels. But Poincar's investigation faces an astronomical number of obstacles. Two key persons of interest, Fenster's ex-fiance Madeleine Rainier and his star graduate student Dana Chambi, answer his questions evasively and then disappear. Imprisoned Bosnian war criminal Stipo Banovi, blaming Poincar for his capture, hires assassins to eliminate his wife, son and grandchildren. Felix Robinson, the new Head of Interpol, demands that Poincar retire from fieldwork immediately. And the Soldiers of Rapture, eerily prefiguring the summer and fall of 2011, announce that the world will end at 11:38 a.m. on August 15a moment that provides a suitably dramatic backdrop for the otherwise muffled climax of Rosen's hugely ambitious debut thriller.First in a proposed series, though it's hard to imagine its sequels topping it for sheer chutzpah.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When American mathematical genius James Fenster is blown up in an Amsterdam hotel while at a World Trade meeting, veteran Interpol agent Henri Poincare gets the case. He recently captured a Serbian war criminal who, now in prison, has orchestrated brutal retaliation on Poincare's family. Battered by these personal problems, as well as poor health, he finds himself confronted by a ruthless tycoon, a charismatic leader of world indigenous groups, religious militants awaiting the Rapture, and his own boss. In the meantime, Fenster's ex-fiancee is missing and so is his grad assistant, the murder suspect. At the heart of the puzzle is a mathematical formula that could drastically change the world's economic systems. Rosen has written nonfiction and radio essays, but this is his first novel, and it's an impressive debut. VERDICT Weaving fractals and chaos theory into an international mystery that also confronts great moral and theological questions, Rosen crafts a literate, complex tale in this first of a series; a prequel will be next. Highly recommended and noteworthy for a scarcity of vulgar language. [See the Q&A with Rosen in M.M. Adjarian's mystery preview, "Dispatches from the Edge," LJ 4/15/11.-Ed.]-Roland Person, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., -Carbondale (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
