THE FRACTAL MURDERS

Cohen’s debut, self-published in 2002, plunges a federal prosecutor–turned–private eye into the unexpectedly murderous world of higher mathematics.

What are the odds that three of the country’s leading experts in fractal geometry—the study of those minute and indivisible patterns that structure apparently random shapes like shorelines—would die violently within a few months? University of Colorado math professor Jayne Smyers, who sent her paper on fractals to five peers only to learn that three of them were unavailable for comment, doesn’t believe in that kind of coincidence. She wants Pepper Keane, a former judge-magistrate for the Marines with a taste for Heidegger and Gordon Lightfoot, to find out what’s going on and whether she’s in danger herself. Buzz-cut Pepper, who not only reads Being and Time but insists on explaining it to you, is little more than a collection of clichés, the most important of which is his grudge against Mike Polk, the Denver FBI agent responsible for his lover’s death, and for burying the current case in denial that the three deaths were related. But Cohen has a gift for making fractals, which have unexpectedly lucrative applications, not only accessible but exciting. And his hunt for the killer—abetted, of course, by the obligatory colorful sidekicks and burgeoning romance—crackles with mounting tension.

Only the gratuitous final twist, which demonstrates mainly that the author’s capable of a final twist, spoils the workmanlike geometry.