LIBRARY PARADOX: VANESSA DUNCAN

A famous-and famously anti-Semitic-professor has been killed, shot in his own library, and the police, eager to close the books on the murder, have arrested a young Jewish man who was conveniently on the scene. But this is 1896, and with the notorious 'Dreyfus Affair' much in the news, Vanessa Weatherburn has real questions about his guilt and about England's casual bigotry. Finding the truth will take Vanessa deep into London's Hassidic community, where she struggles to understand the customs of a foreign country. But the effort will pay off, if only because it sheds some surprising light on a peculiar passion of Vanessa's-a problem in mathematical logic known as the Library Paradox.