Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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I loved this intelligent and inventive novel and I'm sure that it will find legions of fans amongst aficionados of classic crime. It's the most fun I've had in ages -- Cathy Rentzenbrink 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. Chess is all about rules and symmetry,’ she continued, ‘but conflict is usually just cruel and dirty.’

One of the year's most entertaining crime novels" ( Sunday Times) - this summer's most original mystery debut

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.

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.As Julia and McAllister discuss each of these tales, it's clear the editor has an agenda. She thinks McAllister killed a woman called Elizabeth White decades ago, a crime the press dubbed the 'White Murder.' Furthermore, Julia thinks McAllister left clues about this in his stories....which she tries to winkle out. Thus, it's a bit of a cat and mouse game between Julia and McAllister, with each one keeping secrets. 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? I haven't read a book like this before and as a huge Agatha Christie fan it was a genuine joy to read offering a homage to that greatest of crime novelists whilst also being entirely it's own thing. 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 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.

Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for sending me an ARC of The Eighth Detective in exchange for an honest review. A box of delights . . . Pavesi's revelations are completely unexpected, right up to the end New York Times 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! This is a clever, original mystery. A mathematician wrote a book of murder mystery short stories in the 1930s. The book was meant to outline the necessary rules for a mystery. ”The number of suspects must be two or more, otherwise there is no mystery, and the number of killers and victims must be at least one each, otherwise there no murder...Then the final requirement is the most important. The killer must be drawn from the set of suspects.” Terrific. Alex Pavesi knows the genre inside out. One of the year's most entertaining crime novels * 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. I have never read a book quite like this. It's original, clever and compelling - and the revelations at the end took me totally by surprise. Rachel Abbott I loved this intelligent and inventive novel and I'm sure that it will find legions of fans amongst aficionados of classic crime. It's the most fun I've had in ages Cathy Rentzenbrink She turned to face him, her eyes narrowed. ‘Chess is a cheap metaphor. It’s what men use when they want to talk in a grandiose way about conflict.’

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 PinboroughI 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. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. A young editor named Julia Hart travels to a remote village in the Mediterranean hoping to convince a writer to republish his collection of detective stories. On meeting him she realises there are bigger mysteries than the detective stories. Julia Hart is an editor who visits Grant McAllister, the reclusive mathematician, with an offer to republish his sole book of short stories. The stories are mysteries that Grant wrote about 30 years ago as illustrations of his theory of mysteries. This book consists of alternating chapters. Each of the short stories is followed by a chapter in which Julia and Grant discuss the story and she tries to ferret out hidden meaning in the story and details of Grant’s life Thirty years ago, Grant McCallister wrote a mathematical paper titled “The Permutations of Detective Fiction,” which set out to prove the ingredients* of every murder mystery. As part of demonstrating the paper’s arguments, he wrote seven murder mysteries later published in a collection called The White Murders. Now, Julia Hart meets with Grant on a remote island to review and edit the stories so that the collection can be republished. But Julia keeps finding subtle, deliberate errors in the stories. What do those errors mean? Are they clues showing some connection between the collection—and Grant—and a long ago unsolved murder?