A review by tregina
The Square Root of Murder by Camille Minichino, Ada Madison

3.0

It always feels like damning with faint praise when I say I like a book more than I expected to, but...well, I liked this more than I expected to, especially after putting it down after the first couple chapters and picking it up again weeks later. The university environment felt inauthentic, more like the author was dropping the appropriate lingo rather than actually understanding academia and higher level mathematics, and that really turned me off in the beginning. But I liked that the police were competent, I liked that the protagonist was in a functional and believable relationship before the start of the story, and I liked that she felt kind of like a shitheel for manipulating her friends and withholding evidence from the police because she was trying to run her own investigation.

It made sense for this one novel, because she was defending her friend and because it was said repeatedly that the crime was such a rare occurrence, but I'm not sure how it's going to spin into a series. I think I might leave this one at the one.