The Eighth Detective

also published as Eight Detectives
by Alex Pavesi (read by Emilia Fox)

Library loan

 

 

Publisher's Summary
 
There are rules for murder mysteries. There must be a victim. A suspect. A detective.

Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked all the rules out - and wrote seven perfect detective stories to demonstrate. But that was 30 years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days.

Until Julia Hart, a brilliant, ambitious editor knocks on his door. Julia wishes to republish his book, and together they must revisit those old stories: an author hiding from his past and an editor keen to understand it.

But there are things in the stories that don’t add up. Inconsistencies left by Grant that a sharp-eyed editor begins to suspect are more than mistakes. They may be clues, and Julia finds herself with a mystery of her own to solve.

Alex Pavesi's The Eighth Detective is a love letter to classic detective stories with a modern twist, where nothing is as it seems, and proof that the best mysteries break all the rules.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company 
©2020 Alex Pavesi (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

 

A solidly three-star read.

I grabbed this one after reading Elanterri's review. I wanted to see if I agreed with her assessment or if as a reader of mysteries I would have a different take on the book. I agreed with her but have my own take on the book.

McAllister's mathematical analysis of the 4 ingredients (as they were described in the book, not rules) were interesting but, in the final analysis, banal. It might make a fun paper to write for a college "math for poets" paper to show that you understand set theory. ("For poets" was a designation we used at my college to describe a series of somewhat watered-down classes that were aimed at fulfilling the requirement that we all had to take at least two classes in each of four areas of endeavor). For lovers of murder mysteries, this mathematical analysis is just one more way to look at the stories we love to read.

The structure of the book is just plain weird: stories within a story with some twists. Julia Hart reads the stories to McAllister and then they discuss them and when they get to the end of the 7th short story, all hell breaks lose. That same discussion 6 times over just got boring. Honestly, I would have been just as happy to read the unadulterated short stories because they were much more interesting that the rest of the tale.

The bottom-line is that something was missing from this book, something that makes this a "meh" rather a "wow."