Review | Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi

Standalone/Series – Standalone

Genre – Mystery

Format – Paperback

Audience – Adult

Publisher – Penguin

Date of Publication – 5th August 2021

Number of Pages – 352

Synopsis

All Murder Mysteries follow a simple set of rules. 
In the 1930s, Grant McAllister, a mathematics professor turned author, worked them out, hiding their secrets in a book of crime stories. 
Then Grant disappeared. 
Julia Hart has finally tracked him down. She wants to know what happened to him. 
But she’s about to discover that a good mystery can be a murder to solve…

Thoughts:

As mystery novels go, Eight Detectives is the most unique I’ve ever read. In fact I’d say it is more so an analysis of mystery novels, highlighting the main components as mathematical constructs (ratios of killers, suspects, victims, detectives etc to each other) than it is an actual mystery in itself. For most of the novel we’re reading stories that Grant McAllister wrote twenty or so years ago and the analysis Julia Hart makes, using those mathematical constructs as the skeleton, so she can package them together as a full book to be published. I quite enjoyed this format, seeing a mix of murder mystery tropes all working together, but isn’t going to work for everyone. It’s very methodical, slow paced and it takes time for all the puzzle pieces to slot together.

Secondly, it’s only within the last 100 or so pages that we learn about Grant and Julia, and the secrets they’re personally hiding within and around these stories. They are very much secondary to the mysteries until their personal lives are revealed. It was done a little bit too near the end for my liking but I was still surprised by the revelations of both characters and their connections to the stories.

Rating

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