Alex Pavesi's exceptional debut The Eighth Detective is at once a novel, a collection of stories and a how-to guide on writing mysteries.
Pavesi introduces professor of mathematics Grant McAllister, who published a research paper in 1937 called "The Permutations of Detective Fiction," which lays out mathematical formulas for mystery stories. There must be a victim, a detective, a killer, at least two suspects, etc. McAllister then wrote seven stories applying variations on those rules and published them in a collection titled The White Murders.
Nearly 30 years later, young editor Julia Hart tracks him down on a remote Mediterranean island with an offer to republish the collection. Since McAllister's eyesight is failing and he wrote the stories so long ago, Julia spends days reading them aloud to him, followed by discussions of each, to refresh his memory. Right away she notices discrepancies in some descriptions, and details too similar to a real-life murder to be coincidences. Why is McAllister evasive every time she asks about them?
The short stories within the novel pay homage to classics penned by the likes of Agatha Christie--one mystery closely resembles And Then There Were None--and some are more surprising than others. Some readers might find Julia and McAllister's postmortem of each story a bit too technical, but wordsmiths will glean nerdy delight from the conversations between author and editor about structure and plotting. It's ironic that McAllister insists every mystery story follows a basic formula, when Pavesi keeps readers guessing with a novel that defies the rules. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd