Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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Each time she finishes reading a short story the final line appears twice (once at end of the short story and once at the beginning of the following 'Conversation'). S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Harry Vance slips out of his lover’s bed for a mysterious nighttime meeting. An argument had been building between them all afternoon, ever since Bunny had brought their lunch to a sudden end. Pavesi’s revelations are completely unexpected, right up to the end (New York Times) An absolute triumph of a novel (Ali Land, author of Good Me, Bad Me) This super-smart homage to the Agatha Christie tradition is a must.

And there are combinations, such as the detective being the killer or multiple guilty parties or even— wait for it—the victim solving his own murder. The short story format probably doesn’t help – I’m not a fan of short stories, but I thought because there’s an underlying story running through all of them it would make for an interesting format. In an attempt to marry his ideas up with literature he privately published a book - The White Murders - consisting of seven short stories, each of which demonstrate his ‘rules’ in some way.

If you are a mystery lover and a lover of discussing books (like I am), then this is a must read for you. She grew impatient and picked up a whole handful of stones, throwing them one by one until her hands were empty. I'm unsure which was more clever - the myriad of collected tales with their disparate and unguessable endings, or the story arc that combined them all and had me equally as floored by the grand reveals and concluding twists. The structure of the book is unlike anything I’ve read before and I can’t imagine how tough it must have been to create.

It’s capped with a stunning ending that had me rewinding the audiobook to make certain I’d heard what I heard. The blade was almost entirely hidden; they could just see a thin line of silver between his body and the black handle, like a glimpse of moonlight coming through a crack in the curtains.The author seems to have little recollection of the intentional discrepancies he peppered into his stories, but the editor is unyielding and tries to learn more about his private life (which made certain later reveals less 'shocking'). Please read it and send me thank you notes and cupcakes for showing your appreciation to my recommendation. And as they begin re-visiting the stories one by one, Julia realizes that nothing is as it seems, that each story hides more than it reveals and that Grant himself is the biggest mystery of all. It is so unique (which is good, but can also frustrate others and turn them off), but I live for these books!

You’re gonna have to look for clues and details, interpret new theories about mysteries, and even do some math.

Once they start to revisit the stories Julia discovers that there are things that don’t add up and there are inconsistencies that raise her suspicions. He watched her walk deeper into the house: successively smaller versions of her framed by further doorways along the corridor. Henry was sitting sideways in his chair, with his legs hooked over the arm and a guitar resting on his lap. They’re generally the classic old-fashioned, cosy mystery of days gone by, but for me they just fell a little short of the real thing. His debut novel Eight Detectives was picked by the Sunday Times and the New York Times as one of their books of the year.

I haven't read a book like this before and as a huge Agatha Christie fan it was a genuine joy to read offering a homage to that greatest of crime novelists whilst also being entirely it's own thing. Through a wrought-iron grille she could see a fly repeatedly hitting itself against the closed window of Bunny’s bedroom. None of these insights are breathtaking and I found it frustrating to wade through the stories only for it to be revealed that the only relevant thing to takeaway was something as straightforward as individuals can collude and any subset of suspects can be guilty. For example, there is the whole set of characters; the subsets are: victim(s), suspects (must be at least 2), a killer(s), and detective(s). Co-authors Nelson DeMille and his son Alex have created interesting characters, though Brodie might be the type that appears more in fiction than in the real world: About to be handcuffed by a pair of armed men, he “suddenly spun around and delivered a ball-busting kick, under the guy’s ballistic vest, and into his non-ballistic balls.It was very faint – almost not there at all – but she could still hear it, as unmistakable as a stone in her shoe. Julie Hart is sharp minded, extremely smart editor who can easily read the messages hidden behind the lines and her detail oriented mind helps her to extract the secret essence of the stories and discrepancies as well. He previously worked as a software engineer and before that studied mathematics to PhD level, during which time he worked as a part-time bookseller.