Description

Cambridge, 1888. Dr Geoffrey Akers, Fellow in Pure Mathematics at St John’s College, has been found dead, struck down by a violent blow to the head. What could provoke such a brutal act? Schoolmistress Vanessa Duncan, finding herself in amongst Cambridge’s brightest scholarly minds, discovers that the motive may lie in mathematics itself.

Drawn closer to the case by a blossoming friendship with mathematician Arthur Weatherburn, Vanessa begins to investigate. When she learns of Sir Isaac Newton’s elusive ‘n-body problem’ and the prestigious prize offered to anyone with a solution, things begin to make sense. But with further deaths occurring and the threat of an innocent man being condemned, Vanessa must hurry with her calculations…