Eight Detectives

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.

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 to further work from the author (I might even be convinced to check his PhD thesis).