Murder at the Margin: A Henry Spearman Mystery Paperback – 22 September 2014

If you enjoy the most hackneyed cliches of mystery novels, prose so clumsy you would swear it was written by a non-native speaking high-school student, cardboard characters and deus ex machina solutions, then this is the perfect book for you. If you think the economic picture of human beings as perfectly rational utility optimisers is not merely a useful theoretical construct, but a perfectly accurate portrayal of the entire human psychology, then you will enjoy finally reading authors who agree with you. And if you giggle uncontrollably at crude, right-wing jabs at the humanities, ethics, racial equality, socialism, feminism, unions, social movements, and altruism, and take comfort in the world reasuringly portrayed through a thick smudge of colonialist libertarian conservatism, this novel will please you to no end.For everyone else my hearty recommendation is to avoid spending time or money on one of the very worst books I have ever had the misfortune to read. The novel's redeeming quality is its noble ambition of introducing and illustrating economic theory in a popular form. Its execution of that ambition is a spectacular failure.

Another murder mystery involving Economics professor Henry Spearman. I read "The Fatal Equilibrium" first and loved it. Hoped this would be as good; it wasn't. The mystery itself is O.K., nothing to brag about, even some holes. The economics being introduced through "real life" as the story goes along is fun.

Read this book in a day. Great fun. Plan to read it again.

As an economist who loves detective stories and mysteries, I ought to be the perfect audience. There are better books out there that mix economics with fictional storytelling, however, such as Russ Roberts' The Invisible Heart. There are also better mysteries out there.If you're looking for a quick read and really love economics, this may be worth a try. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it.

Lol had to read for class