Alex Pavesi

Six Friends. One Game. One Murder. Can You Tell Fact from Fiction? 'The master puppeteer of literary crime' JANICE HALLETT - May, 1999: Six friends gather at a country house for a birthday. The host insists they play a game. Each will write a story about one friend murdering another. Points are given for plausibility. No secret, grudge or affair is off limits. Six stories. Six murders. And now six unexpected motives. Because this game is about to get murderously real... - 'Today's greatest exponent of playful detective fiction' GUARDIAN 'A new spin on the traditional country house murder... when the style is this good, it's worth the investment' Irish News Praise for Alex Pavesi's sensational bestseller, Eight Detectives 'One of the year's most entertaining crime novels' Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month 'So, so clever... Agatha Christie would take her hat off to this one - bravo!' Sarah Pinborough 'A wonderfully tricksy debut and a loving tribute to the golden age of crime fiction' Mail on Sunday 'A box of delights... Pavesi's revelations are completely unexpected, right up to the end' New York Times

A New York Times Top Ten Thriller of the Year "One of the most innovative mysteries in recent memory." - The Wall Street Journal Alex Pavesi's The Eighth Detective is a love letter to classic detective stories with a modern twist, where nothing is as it seems, and proof that the best mysteries break all the rules. There are rules for murder mysteries. There must be a victim. A suspect. A detective. Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked all the rules out - and wrote seven perfect detective stories to demonstrate. 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 brilliant, 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. "Dizzying, dazzling... When did you last read a genuinely original thriller? The wait is over."-A.J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window