Eight Detectives - Rambling Readers

English language

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

ISBN:: 978-1-4059-4498-4

(1 review)

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 …

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.

4 editions

OriginalBarbas reviewed Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi

An exceedingly original murder mistery

5 stars

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 …

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).