PhDeath: The Puzzler Murders by James P. Carse is a fictional mystery taking place at a university in New York. Mr. Carse is a university professor himself.

This is a very smart murder mystery. The plot keeps on moving forward and Mr. Carse does not underestimate his audience, writing in rich language and assuming the reader knows what he’s talking about (or, at least, can use an Internet search engine).

The murdered, known only as The Puzzler, sends 10 puzzles to the same university, each puzzle will disclose the name of the professor who is next in line to die. A committee chaired by Prof. Carmody is tasked with solving these puzzles before the next murder. The group gets lots of help, from grade school math teachers to Noble Laureates in solving those puzzles and getting to the murderer.

This book took me a little longer than usual to read because I had a great time trying (emphasis on “trying”) to solve the puzzles, which come in a form of lists (10 each, a pattern repeating itself throughout the book). The first three puzzles I had some luck and one or two of the last ones, but some I had no idea where to even start – all part of the fun.

The social commentary the author provided, being a university professor, was also well worth reading. I’m glad someone in education feels the way he does and that maybe there is some way we can correct the issues.

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PhDeath by author James Carse is called a thriller but it would more rightly be called an academic or even more accurately a cerebral mystery if such a designation exists. A university campus is beset by a series of murders of professors. Before each crime, a complicated puzzle is sent that names the next victim. The police are completely baffled by the murders and a committee is setup by the university president to try to solve the puzzles before anymore have to die.

Carse, himself, is a Professor Emeritus at New York University and he clearly knows his subject including all of the hypocrisies, scandals, and petty fights fueled by eg the need to publish or perish that can, I imagine, arise on any university campus. The cover blurb describes PhDeath as fast paced; I would disagree. It is certainly smart but its pacing is rather slow as the puzzles, which all have 10 parts are discussed, analysed by the Committee and, in a couple of cases, by expert outsiders, each part is looked at and solved separately, and evidence is examined it seems minutely. Like I suspect most readers, I tried my hand at solving them but I admit, in the end, I managed to solve only one and some parts of a couple of others. For the most part, though, they were completely beyond my admittedly meager puzzle-solving skills but it was a lot of fun trying.

Case explains the motivation behind each murder and they are definitely not your usual reasons. Perhaps because my university years are long behind me and any relations I have had since with academic types has been social, as much as I have no doubt they addressed real problems in academia, they didn’t exactly give me that aha moment that, say, an Agatha Christie mystery might. Still, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s been a long time since I had to work so hard to get to the solution of a murder mystery – it may seem odd that I found this a reason to enjoy it but, after reading a whole lot of mysteries that were so formulaic that the solution was obvious in the first chapter, PhDeath was a nice challenge. ( )