Pun Salad

This 2018 book was recently honored as one of The 25 Best Mystery Novels of the Past 25 Years (WSJ gifted link) by WSJ reviewer Tom Nolan. It received other numerous accolades when it was published. And, to make it even more tempting for me, there's a lot of associations with my alma mater, Caltech. So I put it on my get-at-library list, and…

Well, it turned out not to be my cup of tea. I hasten to say that's on me, not the author, Nova Jacobs. Your mileage may, etc. It's very "literary", and my patience for that sort of thing is thin.

There are many characters, most are various members of the Severy family, headed up by the titular Isaac. Isaac's death is self-predicted in the book's two-page prologue, where he prepares two breakfasts, one for him, one for his executioner.

And then we jump to his funeral and memorial service, as experienced by his granddaughter, Hazel. She's the owner of a failing Seattle bookstore, and doesn't fit in too well with the rest of the family. In fact, nobody fits in that well, all seem to be in various states of dysfunction. But (it seems) Hazel is the one Isaac has chosen to carry out his last wishes; she receives a cryptic last letter from Isaac, requesting her assistance in handling his "last equation". But unearthing that work turns out to be difficult.

I said there were a lot of characters, and they all appear pretty much concurrently during the funeral. (At my age, difficult to keep 'em all straight.) Their various foibles get revealed as the book proceeds. But you'll notice there are holes in the family tree, too, and those need revealing.

A final big problem for me: I never came close to believing in the dangerous powers of the "equation", which is manifestly more powerful than E=mc². Nope, not even at Caltech could they work that out.