Engaging. Your feelings about the ending of the framing narrative may vary (it is hotly debated amongst my friends) but if you enjoy "golden age" detective fiction, the central stories - and the series of twists late in the game - are really rather clever. ( )

Started in august and now it’s November and I couldn’t finish it. Slow and creepy but maybe I was just in the wrong mood? May try again later.

If this book was just insufferably boring then it would be a 2-star book, but seeing how it is insufferably boring AND long I cannot give it more than a single star. The story starts out horrid and bizarre, but that is quickly explained at the beginning of the second chapter. But at the end of the second chapter, in the first handful of pages, you can deduce just about the entire story. And after that, it gets insufferably worse as what amounts to the two characters in the story are horrid and hateful.

That's the end of my Pavesi experiment. ( )

A young woman comes to visit an author and mathematician. She would like to publish his manuscript written 30 years earlier, but first they must discuss the stories. As she points out discrepancies and errors in the stories, he can't seem to tell her why they are they. Each one of the stories has some tie in to The White Murders, but the author denies it.
As the story progresses, you recognize the homage to various mysteries. However, it is unclear until later what the real motive was behind the discussion of the manuscript and who the players are. Very clever. ( )

The Eighth Detective (2020) by Alex Pavesi. There was a lot of publicity surrounding this novel’s release. Mention of “Golden Age” throwback and highly inventive plot led me to believe this was going to be a classic crime novel for the ages.
The story is this: in 1937 Grant McAllister, a mathematician, wrote in a research paper entitled ‘The Permutations of Detective Fiction’ the rules for murder mysteries. In the paper he calculated the possibilities and the different structures and some, but not all , of the possible permutations. You must have at least one victim, at least one suspect but more is better, and at least one detective. Of course, the detective could be in either of the other two categories, as could the victim(s) or suspect(s), To illustrate his theories McAllister had published in a small quantity a collection of seven short stories called “The White Murders”.
The book did not sell well.
Now (sometimes in the 1970s) he has been contacted by an editor from a small publishing house who is interested in reissuing his book. He has agreed to this and so the novel is set in motion.
Each of the seven short stories is read aloud by the editor in alternating chapters of our book. The in-between chapters are a discussion of the story focused between Grant and Julia Hart, the editor. She points out several inconsistencies, or possible errors, in each of the read chapters and Grant must counter, or simply answer, to the charges.
The main body of the book is set on a small island somewhere in the Mediterranean where Grant is supposed to have lived in seclusion for the past few decades. Why he is there is never explained. But there is an interesting happenstance that gives a hint to his move to a small island. About the time he published his collection, there was a real-life murder of a young woman with the last name White, and the papers had a great deal of discussion about “The White Murder”. Could there be a link between McAllister and the young Miss White that caused him to leave England all those years ago?
As to the short stories themselves: mostly they are plain boring. There is a complete borrowing of possibly one of the top four most famous Christie novels, with a slight twist to the end that doesn’t excuse the “appropriation” of the plot. The plots range from two people talking about the dead Bunny and why only one of them could have done it to a locked room mystery where all the suspects, or none of them, were the killer(s) and so forth. The stories served as a frustration in that there is never enough information given for the reader to solve the crime, despite one the the tales having the Golden Age gismo of the telling the reader they have all the information needed to solve the crime.
To compound this problem we have the revelation that Julia has not been telling the tales strictly as written. At first it was an accident when she skipped an important line or two at the end of the first story. Grant didn’t correct her as to the ending of the tale, which when revealed is a major twist to the outcome of the story, She intentionally did it a second and third time, and again Grant didn’t correct the endings. This then turned into a plot device for her, the “Eighth Detective”, to discover the true Grant McAllister. So if what she suspected after the first two or three stories is true, why bluster on through the remainder of the stories and not just jump to the end?
Because you wouldn’t have much of a book. I dislike when characters do not fulfill their contract with the reader. They are supposed to behave as real people and do what a real person would do, or have a damn good reason for their actions.
There is no good reason provided.
To me the seven short stories didn’t sound like something written in the 1930s. Being a big fan of “The Golden Age” crime novels, these stories felt more blunt in the usage of language than those more subtle stories. Compare the island mystery here with original Christie version to have a better insight into what I mean.
And why would a “small publishing house”, which usually translates to one struggling financially, be interested in bringing a failed manuscript back in publication with all the inherent costs, including flying and housing and feeding an editor for about a week in the Med? If you stop and think about it, there has to be more to Julia than is first presented. But is it all that interesting?
One of the final reveals seems a letdown after the long journey through the stories and the conversations that separated them. The other end twist should have you saying ‘but of corse that is the same answer I had twenty or thirty pages before this point.’ Granted, if you just read the book and not think about it too much, you could have a very satisfying time. But reviewing what you have read may leave you wondering what the big hoopla was all about. ( )