Review: The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 2020
Genres: Adult Fiction, Mystery
Pages: 289
Format: eBook
Source: Publisher
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A thrilling, wildly inventive nesting doll of a mystery, in which a young editor travels to a remote village in the Mediterranean in the hopes of convincing a reclusive writer to republish his collection of detective stories, only to realize that there are greater mysteries beyond the pages of books.

There are rules for murder mysteries. There must be a victim. A suspect. A detective. The rest is just shuffling the sequence. Expanding the permutations. Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked them all out – calculating the different orders and possibilities of a mystery into seven perfect detective stories he quietly published. But that was thirty years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days.

Until Julia Hart, a sharp, 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 cerebral, inventive novel with a modern twist, where nothing is what it seems, and proof that the best mysteries break all the rules.

The format was really fun and unique. We meet Julia Hart who has traveled to a remote island to interview Grant McAllister to reissue his old book about murders. Each rule is demonstrated in a short story that proves his rule, interspersed with chapters of Julia and Grant’s interview.

I really enjoyed the short stories, more than I thought I would. They were all engaging and interesting. I looked forward to them even more than the overall general mystery behind Julia and Grant.

The format was a bit hard to get into at first. I didn’t know going in the book was laid out like that so it took me a moment. But I think it worked. Grant and Julia are not that interesting by themselves, until the very end, and so the story stories really carried the urgency of the book forward. That said, I wish there was more character to both Julia and Grant throughout the book. They were merely vehicles for the short stories to be told and didn’t get interesting until the ending.

I would be interested in reading more of the author, looking for a longer main story format. For so much of this story, Julia and Grant’s main mystery is over shadowed by the short stories until the very end when their connection is revealed. A couple of the short stories I wished they had gone on a bit longer.

With plenty of twists and turns, The Eighth Detective is a fast read, perfect for readers who want a little something different. I’m interested in more of Alex’s books because the short stories were so entertaining.