Book Review | Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi

Thirty years ago, maths professor Grant McCallister published a paper to calculate every permutation of the murder mystery genre. As part of his research, he wrote seven stories for a collection called The White Murders. Now, book editor Julia Hart visits Grant to review the collection to be republished. But Julia keeps finding inconsistencies in the stories. She realises that these errors might be clues and there could be a real mystery to be solved.

I think that when you’re reading about death as entertainment, it should leave you feeling slightly uncomfortable, even slightly sick.

Eight Detectives is an ambitious, creative take on crime fiction that keeps you guessing. The book is framed as Julia and Grant reviewing his collection, so you get seven short stories tackling different aspects of the murder mystery. They are like a violent, sinister version of Agatha Christie’s mysteries (one is a direct homage to one of her famous works). I thought they were fun to read and solve, but they felt disconnected from Julia and Grant’s story. Everything ultimately comes together but not as much as I hoped. I wish we had gotten more of Julia and Grant, especially in light of a revelation at the end.

That said, this is the perfect summer book because Julia and Grant meet on a remote Mediterranean island and you can almost feel the hot and humid weather through the pages. The writing is deliberately old-fashioned and almost clinical at times, yet somehow it makes the book more affecting when it matters. Like its protagonists, the book brings surprise after surprise. This is not just a murder mystery but a quest for truth, a deceptive play on literature, and a forbidden gay romance.

Eight Detectives is an intriguing, cobwebbed mystery that will appeal to fans of detective stories.

About the author: Alex Pavesi

Photo by Craig Whitehead