Looking for a last minute book to purchase this holiday season for the bright business or economics student in your life? Perhaps the student in your life appreciates mixing economic theory with murder, as in The Mystery of the Invisible Hand by Marshall Jevons.

Marshall Jevons is the pseudonym of economics professors Kenneth Elzinga of the University of Virginia and the late Trinity University economics professor William Breit.

Professor Breit was a beloved figure on campus at Trinity in San Antonio, TX before he passed away in 2011, remaining connected to students and his department in the years following his retirement.

Elzinga and Breit created the fictional murder-solving Harvard economist Henry Spearman.

Spearman – who wins the Nobel Prize in Economics at the start of this novel – applies economics principles to solve murders. Think Hercule Poirot meets Milton Friedman.

Trinity University in San Antonio, TX

In The Mystery of the Invisible Hand – the fourth in a series of Spearman mysteries, the economist-detective arrives as a visiting professor at Monte Vista University in San Antonio, TX – a transparent portrayal of San Antonio's Trinity University.

Each chapter begins with a passage or quip from a famous economist.

Inside jokes of the economics profession abound – like naming a character Bruce Goolsby, a thinly disguised reference to Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama.

The humor of Breit and Elzinga shines through in their light satire of academic politics and foibles.

We meet the hard-charging Trustee Annelle Cubbage – heir to a Texas ranching fortune – who wants the best that money can buy. Cubbage wants what she wants, when she wants it. Cubbage creates the “Cubbage Visiting Nobel Professorship” that brings the Nobel Laureate Spearman to Monte Vista University.

The anxious scholar Jennifer Kim – untenured – hesitates awestruck in the face of Spearman's awesome reputation.