Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

Product Information

Titled "The Eighth Detective" in the UK this is a Christie-esque puzzle that offers not just one crime tale but several, as an editor works with an author on a book of short stories...these stories all together offer up a particularly intelligent formula that doesn't show it's true face until the end. Eight Detectives is clever, involving and has a practically styled prose that keeps you immersed throughout. What DOES make a good crime novel - this is the theme Eight Detectives explores throughout it's twisty narrative, where the stories themselves speak to a wider mystery and the effect of reader and author is key For a debut novel this is a very brave concept and the author really goes for something different. Although it is a very good effort and certainly an entertaining read I am not sure he quite achieves the best mix of dialogue. I would have preferred more conversation between the editor and author rather than the short stories. It feels at times too much like a book of short stories, nevertheless an entertaining read.

Grant McAllister is a retired mathematician living on a remote island in the Mediterranean. Over twenty years ago he wrote a collection of mystery stories and had a meager publishing of them. Julia Hart is an editor representing a small publisher who found a copy of the book and wants to republish the collection. She arranges a meeting and they read and discuss each story methodically, fitting them into his carefully designed mathematical theory of mystery construction. I did not anticipate quite how extraordinary this was going to be. The plot sounded intriguing but I was thrilled to find that every short story this fictional author wrote was also included here, on each altering chapter. Those in-between focused on the present-day fictional author and his new editor, as they battled for wits, truth, and dominance. I'm unsure which was more clever - the myriad of collected tales with their disparate and unguessable endings, or the story arc that combined them all and had me equally as floored by the grand reveals and concluding twists. At each session with the author, Julia reads one story aloud, and then she and McAllister discuss it in detail. Has an intricacy rare in modern crime fiction. Alex Pavesi deserves huge applause for his plot, constructed with all the skill of the old masters * Sunday Express *

He watched her walk deeper into the house: successively smaller versions of her framed by further doorways along the corridor. Then he lit another cigarette.

This is a well written and original novel, it’s clever and a really good puzzle throughout. The format works well and the original stories have an Agatha Christie feel to them which I like and the post story discussions between Grant and Julia are fascinating as those are the sections I enjoy the most because they are revealing. Grant is intriguing as he’s elusive and evasive and Julia is sharply clever and persistent. I really like the concept of the novel and the solving of riddles, are the stories clues to something deeper, or are they a joke or a test? If so, who is testing who? As the end nears and the truth reveals itself (or does it?) it all comes together well. The ending is as enigmatic as Grant! The Eighth Detective" by debut author Alex Pavesi is a fascinating puzzle, a unique perspective on the murder mystery. "The killer or killers must be drawn from the group of suspects [mathematically speaking], the killer(s) must be a subset of the suspects...". Why is Grant McAllister's book titled "The White Murders"? Readers are in for an innovative, very creative read. Kudos to Alex Pavesi. I need to rest,’ he’d drawled, after letting them into the house. ‘Give me some time to sleep, then we can talk.’ So while Bunny had gone upstairs to sleep away the heat of the afternoon, Megan and Henry had collapsed into armchairs on either side of the staircase. ‘A brief siesta.’ This is a short story collection inside a novel. “The Eighth Detective” is about a book editor who wants to publish an obscure novel of short story mysteries. The obscure novel was written by a mathematician who intends to prove that all mysteries follow a mathematical formula. This mathematician, McAllister, had written a research paper entitled “The Permutations of Detective Fiction” stating that specific criteria must be adhered to for a murder mystery. For example, there is the whole set of characters; the subsets are: victim(s), suspects (must be at least 2), a killer(s), and detective(s). The permutations of the different elements are multiple(and yes a victim can solve their own murder and be a detective).I really wanted to like this book more than I did. It promised a clever twist on the classic murder mystery genre, a mind-bending story of books and mysteries within mysteries. The short story format probably doesn’t help – I’m not a fan of short stories, but I thought because there’s an underlying story running through all of them it would make for an interesting format. Unfortunately there’s really not enough of the main story between Julia and Grant here for me, and I didn’t feel able to connect with these characters aside from a vague sense of intrigue as to where it was all leading. This is a case of a blurb promising more than the book delivers. It certainly isn’t “thrilling” (it isn’t even trying to be thrilling) and I also wouldn’t call it “wildly inventive”. The short stories are Agatha Christie-esque, particularly “Trouble on Blue Pearl Island” which is intended as an homage to Christie’s “And Then There Were None”. That was my favorite story because of its diabolical ending. My problem was that the stories weren’t great. Late in the book there is a twist that presents an alternative ending for each story. The new ending didn’t improve any story. Then there is a second twist, and a third one. I think the plot actually had the potential to be clever if the characters had more bite to them. This is not a battle of wits. The characters are more likely to curl up into a fetal position than they are to engage. Also, the short stories could have been better. 3.5 stars The description implies that there are clues to a cold case within the stories, which is true if you know the details of the cold case, but these aren’t given until nearly the end. There was no way for me as a reader to connect the dots and make an attempt at solving that myself. That is apparently not one of the rules of murder mystery writing! It was pointed out by Julia that there were inconsistencies in the text, some that I noticed but it was a bit like they wanted us to play editor rather than solve anything. This super-smart homage to the Agatha Christie tradition is a must. Stylish, ingenious and great fun Sunday Mirror The Eighth Detective is an entertaining read, with some clever surprises. However I felt like I was REALLY reading stories published in the early 1900s....stories that had very unrealistic premises.