Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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This is unique, phenomenal, so smart, complex, challenging, mind blowing debut author! I could only clap and raise my glass to Alex Pavesi who is such a brilliant author and I cannot wait to read his upcoming works in near future. An hour or two, but he’s been drinking.’ Henry was sitting sideways in his chair, with his legs hooked over the arm and a guitar resting on his lap. ‘Knowing Bunny, he’ll be asleep until dinner time.’ An elegantly structured, intellectually challenging and completely unique thriller that grips like a vice Sophie Hannah, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Killings at Kingfisher Hill In the 1930s, Grant McAllister, a mathematics professor turned author, worked them out, hiding their secrets in a book of crime stories.

She approached the bed, stepping around the puddles on the floor. When she was a foot away from the body, Henry stopped her. ‘Do you think we should?’ This book is all about the story, not the characters. If you want characters to bond with, you won’t be happy with this book. 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. In Eight Detectives, Alex Pavesi constructs a remarkable puzzle that turns readers into literary detectives with every new twist. Both a celebration and a reinvention of mystery fiction Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of The Dante ClubThe Eighth Detective is an original, clever, and subversive take on classic murder mysteries. Recommended. Even Julia and Grant are not detailed characters, there is no pen portrait of either, but it is the mystery itself which becomes the focus and drives the novel. Alternative endings to each short story are offered and indeed, there is even a choice of endings when the novel finally reaches (or appears to reach) its conclusion.

The stories themselves are very Christie-esque. They are of a time and style that any Agatha fan would understand and recognise. We have variations on a victim(s) and a detective(s) in various settings. There is even an homage to "Ten Little Indians". The stories themselves are good enough. However it is the extended story about Grant's memories and Julia's interest that is the real story here for me. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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. This book is about a mathematician who has a long-forgotten book of short mysteries rediscovered by a modern day publisher. Through their discussions, we learn he has a mathematical theory about the structure of mysteries. We also see that he may be dropping clues about a larger motive for writing these stories. This is a book within a book, and within both stories the reader is given a bunch of theories and clues to figure out. Some of the time I felt like I was reading Agatha Christie and other times I was put in mind of the Encyclopedia Brown books I loved as a kid. All the stories culminate in a larger mystery to solve. The structure of the book is unlike anything I’ve read before and I can’t imagine how tough it must have been to create. Did Grant put them intentionally to test the readers’ focus or does he have a hidden agenda to connect with those stories with real life murder?

It's rare for me to read a book in a single day, but I couldn't put Eight Detectives down. Compelling, clever, and beautifully-constructed. It deserves to be huge. I genuinely wanted to applaud at the end Alex North So, so clever. A twisty story and an education in the maths of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie would take her hat off to this one - bravo! Sarah Pinborough Towards the end things start changing all over the place and I’m not sure I liked how it was done. It’s an unusual take on the unreliable narrator, I can say that at the very least. I didn’t feel any satisfaction or surprise, I just thought it was a bit silly. I suppose it was set in the past so that it was easier to accept ignorance of things. 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! 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.

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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 It’s a good setup, but not a unique one. Instead, the first thing that sets The Eighth Detective apart is the structure of the novel. The chapters alternate between the collection’s seven short stories and the conversations between Grant and Julia following each story. The seven stories are clever, old school murder mysteries, and the book only work because each story stands up on its own merits as an entertaining mystery. More importantly, The Eighth Detective is quite unusual because it’s incredibly subversive about the murder mystery/detective genre. Little is as it seems in this novel, and the final third contains numerous earned twists, and no less than two endings that nicely illustrate the book’s theme.