The Eighth Detective: A Novel Kindle Edition

enjoyed the book

If you like puzzle mysteries -- ones where in theory using the clues provided by the author you could solve the mystery before the detective -- you'll enjoy this innovative novel. Be aware of the slow start, which makes this seem like a book of short mysteries. But soon you'll be drawn into the mystery of why book editor Julia Hart flies from Edinburgh to a Mediterranean island to meet mathematician Grant McAllister.McAllister points out that all mysteries have to have victims, killers, suspects and detectives. But each character in a mystery story can have multiple roles: suspects can be victims, detectives can be killers and even victims can be killers -- if you're talking about suicide.This book will definitely keep you guessing.

This is a detective story that takes on, and discusses, all the possible kinds of master-detective stories there might be. It takes place in 1930, in the last decades of the Golden Age of pure deduction mystery stories, and it sneaks in allusions to Anthony Berkeley, Ellery Queen, Barnaby Ross, Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton, to mention only the references I noticed. The male protagonist is a mathematician who has worked out all the possible permutations of detective, victim, suspect and killer imaginable—stories, for example, where the detective is the victim (like "D.O.A.")—and, combine the four characters any way you want, this mad mathematician will try to satisfy you.All this could easily come out cold and distant, but no: the book is wonderfully well-written, with a wry sense of humor, and to that it adds a modern use of gangster cruelty and police corruption that was not at all common in the Golden Age. For example, check out this passage:"Keller had been leading a counterfeiting ring in London for many years when one of his associates had tried to take more than his fair share of the profits. Keller had bound the man's hands and feet and run him alive through an industrial meat grinder, then had taken his blood and used it as a replacement for ink, printing a hundred fake pound notes with the victim's innards. He'd given one of these to each of the men in his gang, to remind them of the price of betrayal. Inevitably, one of them had got drunk and tried to spend it."Some Amazon reviewers have been upset and complained about passages like these, and similar readers should be warned, but such characters don't come up often, and when they do, in a way we're jostled out of blaming the book for being too coolly logical.Pavesi uses the plot of Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE for one of his story-chapters, and some readers think there's a lot of Christie in the book in general. Maybe so, but the real great-granddaddy of the novel is Berkeley's THE POISONED CHOCOLATES CASE, which gives six or more solutions to its one big mystery. There are real poisoned chocolates in one of the chapter-stories that has nothing to do with Berkeley, and UNpoisoned chocolates in the chapter that derives entirely from Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Pavesi makes fun of over-solemn detective stories, and he adds some jokes at the expense of the thrills and sadism novels that replaced them.I don't see how a book like this could have been done better. It's postmodern without making you hate postmodernism, and I would have said that was impossible.

I have to say that I agreed with all the reviews, both the ones that said this was a great book and those that said it wasn't. This is the kind of book you will either really love or really hate because it is so different. I have read about 200+ mystery novels during this year of the pandemic and after a while a lot of them sound alike, with similar plots and characters, and I was starting to get bored with the sameness of so many of them. Then I read this book and I loved that it was not the same old thing--it truly is original and clever. While first reading it I didn't particularly like some of the short mystery stories, especially how some of them ended, but when I got near the end of the book some things became clear, new information was revealed, and with that I looked at the short mystery stories in a new light and now liked them a whole lot more (and I applaud the author for even more ingenuity). The mathematical theories of mysteries from the character who wrote the short stories were not particularly interesting and they weren't really new, but I did enjoy the dialogue between the writer and the young editor, and the cat-and-mouse attempts to uncover some hidden truths on the part of the editor and the writer's attempts to avoid and evade. Those interactions between them were interesting and slowly revealed a deeper mystery that also encompassed the short mystery stories. The author ties it all together at the end and to me it was a very satisfying ending. If you are looking for a thriller that truly is original, very clever, and complex, then you will like this book.

I saw a review for this book on the New York Times website and there it was rated highly. It was entertaining but I came away with a feeling that the author was deriving more pleasure from writing it than his readers might from reading it. The self-conscious cleverness of the plots and construction began to grate after a while. If you enjoy detective stories for the way in which the reader is manipulated, then this is the one for you.

OK but not my type of book - interesting theories though

I wouldn't have expected this novel to turn out so well written.

Not credible. And boring as well. Avoid. Sorry I like detective fiction but this....