The Eighth Detective

Alex Pavesi created a detective story reminiscent of Christie’s golden novels, but with a unique, lively structure. It’s a book-riddle that invites the reader to solve the mystery before the main heroine does. A multi-layered detective story with a tangled history and layered plot twists. “The Eighth Detective” is at once an homage to the genre’s classic style and its complete reimagining. All the murder stories follow rules—at minimum, there’s a victim, a detective, and a suspect. Thirty years ago, math professor Grant McAllister figured out those rules and wrote seven brilliant detective tales. But that was a long time ago—now Grant lives as a recluse on a Mediterranean island, counting the remaining days of his life.

And then, like a devil out of a bottle, Julia Hart appears in Grant’s life—an ambitious editor who is passionately eager to republish those very detective stories. Now the writer hiding from his past and the editor trying to understand it must work side by side. Only in Grant’s stories there are plenty of inconsistencies—or maybe clues that will lead to a new, eighth mystery?