From Mark Cohen's mystery The Fractal Murders:

A terrorist bomb in the Middle East, Republicans and Democrats blaming each other for the nation's ills, and an assortment of murders, kidnappings, floods, and droughts. Who wouldn't have a little depression? I turned off the TV, leaned back in my recliner, and picked up Heidegger's Being and Time.
    When I left the practice of law two years ago, I purchased a home in the mountain town of Nederland and began a new life. As part of that I promised myself I'd spend time each day studying philosophy or eastern religions. Those subjects had captivated me in college, and my hope was that immersing myself in them once more might give me some insight into how to deal with my existential pain. So far it hasn't, but at least I'm well read.
    The problem is that I am one of those unlucky souls condemned to forever ponder life's unanswerable questions. I don't know whether this is the cause of my depression or the result of it. Either way, traditional religion never worked for me. I've always had a bit of an authority problem, so I have trouble with the concept of God. I go through life with the nagging suspicion that it's all meaningless, but I read philosophy hoping to prove myself wrong.
    I began my self-study program by reading the pre-Socratics and had since worked my way well into the twentieth century. Consequently, I now found myself trying to understand one of the most incomprehensible philosophers of all time. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, has been variously classified as a phenomenologist, an existentialist, and a mystic. For Heidegger, the fundamental mystery of life was that something, rather than nothing, exists. He spent most of his adult life attempting to develop a philosophy based on this rather obvious fact. Of course, I had spent most of my adult life as a lawyer billing people for my services in in six-minute increments, so who was I to judge?
    As often happens when I read philosophy at night, I soon found myself half asleep and skimming the same paragraph again and again. Something about "Dasein"-Heidegger's term for man, or being. I put the book down. "C'mon, boys," I said to the dogs, "time to hit the hay."

Someone's been murdering math profs, and the dame's hired Pepper Keane to find out why.  ¶ 6:28 AM