Julia wants to sit with the author to revisit the stories and convince him to republish his book. Julia Hart the editor wants to understand why the author is hiding from his past. 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. 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.” For me, this was a clunky, poorly written book. It is possible that the short stories are written badly on purpose. I hope so because they’re distasteful on the whole and full of dreadful metaphors. Having said that, I don’t think the rest of the book is well written either. It’s clear that the intention was to write a clever variable on classic murder / detective mysteries from The Golden Age but, in my opinion, it fails on all counts. It didn’t give me any pleasure whatsoever. Let me go.’ She elbowed him off and ran forward, and then with her shoulders out of his way he saw what she had seen: a pointing finger of blood reaching from below Bunny’s door towards the top of the stairs, pointing straight at him.

Alex Pavesi's Eight Detectives is a delightfully inventive and enjoyable debut which plays fascinating games with the classic murder mystery and puts a fresh spin on the notion of whodunit. Bravo! -- Martin Edwards, winner of the 2020 Diamond Dagger This is one of the most clever stories I’ve read in a long time and I love clever. It’s also a debut novel by the author and I’ll sign up for the next book he chooses to write and release. I wish I could share more but it would be much too spoilerish. It’s capped with a stunning ending that had me rewinding the audiobook to make certain I’d heard what I heard. And speaking of the audio format, the narrator was outstanding. She was not only responsible for distinctively giving voice to the two main characters but a host of others from the individual stories in the collection, which she handled excellently. This turned out to be a gem in the rough for me. 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. Mathematician and first-time novelist Pavesi creates a metamystery that could as easily go in a bookstore’s puzzle section as on the crime shelves. Submissions should be uploaded to http://tmin.edmgr.com or sent directly to Osmo Pekonen, [email protected] 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. 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.

I said the story is present-day-ish. One reading of the dates suggests that Hart and McAllister are meeting in 1965 – twenty-five years after the short story collection, The White Murders, had first been published in 1940. To fans of meta-fiction, 1965 would fit because it was the publication date of John Fowles’ The Magus, a novel about a similarly disparate couple on a Mediterranean island, but that may be no more than serendipity. In publicity Alex Pavesi has talked about Agatha Christie and country houses, but the stories show other influences, many of them post Golden Age. The third story, for instance , “A Detective and his Evidence” is set in the grand houses around a tree-filled London square, but the detective and his motives are closer to those of G F Newman than Dorothy L Sayers or Freeman Wills Crofts. Construction of the whole novel apart, if you have liked the post-war short story collections of Julian Symons, Ngaio Marsh or Christianna Brand, you will recognise something of the same atmosphere here – crime stories, not stories of detection, even if there is a detective. 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 Fate seemed to have become a cat, leaving these curious, mangled items at his door. This time it was a dead body.” 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

Retailers:

Terrific. Alex Pavesi knows the genre inside out. One of the year's most entertaining crime novels * Sunday Times, Crime Book of the Month * It won Debut Book of the Year at the Capital Crime Readers Awards and has been long-listed for the Barry Award for Best First Novel and the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award.