Book Review - Eight Setectives by Alex Pavesi

Title: Eight Detectives
Series: -
Author: Alex Pavesi
 
Description: 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.
 
Review: Thirty years ago, Grant McAllister wrote seven stories that formed the thriller “Murder in White”. Since then, he has lives a secluded life. Young, ambitious editor Julia shows up at his door. She is handling the re-release of the book and want to interview Grant about it.
 
The book starts with a murder mystery story, one of the seven stories McAllister had written. It’s a really good start. But the start was the only thing I really liked about this book. The detectives stories are alternated by the conversations between Grant and Julia, talking about each story in depth. This is a book within a book situation. And when I mostly like this, I really didn’t like it here. Aside from the first story, they were just okay. They all had a different type of twist to them, but none were really groundbreaking.
 
This book is supposed to make the reader think about the murders that happened, trying to solve them themselves. I was not invested at all, an even less in the story of Grant and Julia. I wasn’t enjoying it at all and I didn’t look forward to continuing the book once I had put it down. I finished it merely because I was still waiting for that big WOW. But it never came.
 
I think the set-up of the book is original and it’s well-written, but the stories and the characters didn’t captivate me and I found it boring it times. Wouldn’t recommend.
 
Rating: 2/ 5