Sophie Knowles, a mathematics professor at Henley College in Massachusetts, investigates the death of chemistry colleague Keith Appleton. Sophie's assistant Rachel seems to be the prime suspect, and circumstantial evidence certainly points in her direction. Can Sophie who is up for promotion to full professor manage to clear her assistant without losing her chances for promotion. Like most cozies nowadays, romance plays a part. Sophie's boyfriends pilots a helicopter for a medical unit. His best friend Virgil is one of two detectives working the case. The novel features interesting characters and a great setting, but I was a little disappointed math didn't figure a little more into the plot. The author emphasized Sophie's love of puzzles more than math. ( )

Liked the subtle humor and the academic setting, as well as the summer setting. ( )

Cozy mystery where the protagonist is a math professor in a small college in Massachusetts. I enjoyed the mystery. Naturally I did not get the murderer right. I expected more math in the story. It was different because of the profession of the main character. I like the first person POV. I felt like I was right there with her. ( )

This was a fun new series by a favorite author (Camilla Minichino). The main character is Dr. Sophie Knowles, a professor of mathematics at a small New England college. When a colleague is killed, Sophie starts trying to solve the puzzle of who killed him, and why. Since one of her passions is puzzles, solving them as well as designing them, she thinks she is well suited to this role of sleuth. Her current boyfriend and his best friend, a cop, try and convince her to stay out of investigation but she persists because she not only knew the victim but knows most of the people who could be considered suspects.

I enjoyed all the puzzle lore and the fact that Sophie was so dedicated to her students and her friends. There was a little concern that she was pushing so hard to be involved in the case, at first thinking she "had it over" the cops. Once she realized that the cops weren't idiots and that she needed to share the information she possessed things smoothed out for me and I was able to enjoy the rest of the book.

I didn't see the ending coming so that was a plus for me.

I hope there are more books coming in this series.
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A college professor is killed on campus and Dr. Sophie Knowles needs to figure out who did it. The problem is she, most of the faculty, and many students had 'problems' with the deceased.

This is the first in a new cozy mystery series with a mathematics theme and has both good and bad points. The main characters, namely Sophie, her boyfriend Bruce, the police detective Virgil, and her girlfriend Ariana, are all believable and adequately written. I feel the characters lacked some depth, but perhaps this will come in future books. Also, the characters were a bit predictable. The plot was interesting with a surprising ending. Occasionally the story did lag a bit, but not enough to encourage me to give up on the book. The writing was fine -- typical of cozy mysteries -- neither poor nor great.

One disappointment was the lack of math. Yes, I'm not typical because I do understand higher mathematics, but I had expected a few references to some math. The only real math mentioned is the fact that Dr. Knowles creates math puzzles for magazines (and based on this a few puzzles are included at that end of the book).

Still, this was a fun book to read and I will move on to #2 in the series. ( )