Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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Each day Julia reads one of the stories to him and they discuss it, but as time passes it becomes clear something is amiss. 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. He has that nothing-to-lose attitude, given that his career is swirling down the toilet bowl anyway. She thought at first it was the carried sound of the guitar, coming through the walls, but it wasn’t melodic enough for that. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.

If you like old school detective stories meet complex/twisty/ whodunit plays, this is amazing combination for your needs. The rules for murder mysteries are there must be a victim, a suspect and a detective made up of changes to make the story. Eight Detectives tell the stories, all with echoes of Christie and all solved by observation and deduction rather than by modern-day forensics. She opened a drawer in Bunny’s bedside cabinet: there was nothing inside but underwear and a gold watch.

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. 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 premise of this book is that a young female editor visits an elderly author who lives on a Mediterranean island to edit a collection of murder mysteries he wrote decades beforehand. As each story appears (these are the odd numbered chapters, one to thirteen) the following discussion (in an even numbered chapter) reveals how each story can be Venn mapped, each in a different way to those previous.

His goal-to explore the criteria needed for a tome to be classified as a murder mystery and list all the possible structural variations. Not long enough to develop character, the plot of each is definitely more important, though all offer a mistake, a twist and a solution which the reader is challenged to spot.

However it is the extended story about Grant's memories and Julia's interest that is the real story here for me. I would like to thank both Net Galley and Penguin UK – Michael Joseph for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. 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. Are they clues showing some connection between the collection—and Grant—and a long ago unsolved murder?In their day the masters of the form could produce exquisite labyrinths to astound and engage the reader in equal measure. It promised a clever twist on the classic murder mystery genre, a mind-bending story of books and mysteries within mysteries.

This book will make you want to race through to get to the ending, but you can’t really do that, because it’s so dense and intellectual and you might miss some clues. Some of the stories are straight, some are twist-in-the-tale, there is even a condensed version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. His peace is disturbed by the arrival of Julia Hart, an editor, whose publisher wants to reprint the book. A twisty story and an education in the maths of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie would take her hat off to this one - bravo! Reminds me a bit of "Sins for Father Knox" by Josef Skvorecky which I read [redacted] years ago – that's a collection of stories each of which focuses on breaking one of the "rules" of classic detective stories.

A knife handle emerged from his back, with a twisted red trail leading up to it from the lowest end of the bed. In an attempt to marry his ideas up with literature he privately published a book - The White Murders - consisting of seven short stories, each of which demonstrate his ‘rules’ in some way.