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Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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Henry strummed the guitar as a way of changing the subject. ‘Do you know how to tune this thing?’ He’d found it hanging on the wall above his chair. ‘I could play this if it was tuned.’ 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. The Eighth Detective" had my name written all over it. All in caps. With big blinding lights. It seemed written thinking in all my reading tastes, so...why didn't I enjoy it as much as I should? No, seriously, someone tell me why I didn't, cause I'm not sure.

An absolute triumph of a novel. I read it in two greedy gulps. Intelligent and compelling storytelling. Utterly brilliant -- Ali Land, bestselling author of Good Me, Bad Me An elegantly structured, intellectually challenging and completely unique thriller that grips like a vice' SOPHIE HANNAH 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.All murder mysteries follow a simple set of rules. There must be two or more suspects. One or more victims. Eventually, one of the suspects must be revealed as the killer… At each session with the author, Julia reads one story aloud, and then she and McAllister discuss it in detail. Eight Detectives has been described as clever and unique, but its framing story fell flat for me. I actually enjoyed many of the seven short stories, they were eerie and had echoes of classic mysteries about them. The characters were not fleshed out but the story carried them though. These seven stories were meant to illustrate the mathematics of the murder mystery, the rules that apply to all crime fiction. I think this would have worked just as well with an introduction followed by the stories, but I guess short story collections don’t sell as well as novels.

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. Alex Pavesi has written one of the most creative detective novels of the year...if not of all time. Sharp writing, crisp dialogue, and the end will leave you reeling. An incredible debut novel! Samantha Downing, bestselling author of My Lovely Wife Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Submissions should be uploaded to http://tmin.edmgr.com or sent directly to Osmo Pekonen, [email protected].

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This super-smart homage to the Agatha Christie tradition is a must. Stylish, ingenious and great fun Sunday Mirror Eight Detectives , w ith its necessity to keep reconsidering what has gone before, even while we move to the solution of the mystery (yes, there is a solution, and Julia Hart is its detective), may make readers think of last year’s Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastleby Stuart Turton (like Alex Pavesi a first time author), rather than Gilbert Adair’s Christie pastiches ( The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, etc) of ten years ago. Unlike Evelyn Hardcastle, however, which required learning how to read a present tense, first person, point-of-view narrative (if one was not a video game player from which it was adopted) Eight Detectives makes no such demands . Eight Detectives, though, does require an understanding of rapaciousness, duplicity, evil and disappointment, or why someone such as Sarah on “Blue Pearl Island” should find such an odd way to achieve independence and happiness (and which my spoiler alert prevents me from revealing: just go read). Terrific. Alex Pavesi knows the genre inside out. One of the year's most entertaining crime novels * Sunday Times, Crime Book of the Month *

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. 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 *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 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!

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