A buoyant and hyper-literary debut, Marisha Pessl’s ‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics’ is a murder mystery narrated by a precocious teenage girl, the only child of a brilliant, nomadic professor and a dead mother. Each of the books chapters takes its title from a classic work of literature. I was ready to dislike this book because it verges on gimmicky, but I was bowled over by the relentlessness of the story’s pace and the freshness of Pessl’s literary voice.