Eight Detectives

The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

by

English language

Published Nov. 8, 2020 by Penguin Books, Limited.

ISBN:
978-1-4059-4498-4
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(3 reviews)

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 …

4 editions

reviewed Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi

Very good, but I didn't love the ending.

This is a great murder mystery novel. The blurb basically says it all: a retired mathematician defined all the essential parameters of murder mystery novels, described the possible permutations, and then released a collection of seven short stories that demonstrated all the permutations. The story goes through the stories, and describes the permutations along the way.

The book is easy to read, as it's basically a collection of short stories, and it's a great read.

What I don't like about the blurb is that it implies that there's a greater mystery to solve. I don't like this implication, because it's not possible for the reader to solve this greater mystery, because they aren't given all the facts until the revelation at the conclusion. The conclusion is still excellent; it's a lovely part of the story and a good ending, but it's not a mystery you can solve.

reviewed Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi

An exceedingly original murder mistery

When I picked up this novel as "documentation" for a locked room mystery TTRPG that I am (very slowly) developing, I definitely didn´t know that it was going to be so fitting to it and that it was going to provide me with a mathematical ruleset for designing murder mysteries.

All in all, this is a collection of several stories, with an overarching theme and a plot that links the whole story. The general idea revolves around providing a mathematical definition for a murder mystery and the possible permutations within it.

This has been the happiest I've been studying a mathematical definition ever (and, as a physicist I've had my more than fair share of theorems, definitions and other mathematical fauna to study) and it has been a joyful ride, at least for me (unlike for the characters involved). I highly recommend it and I am looking forward …

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