Ink Ribbon Red by Alex Pavesi

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 22, 2025

Ink Ribbon Red is the color of fictional blood. Or so says Marcin, one of the people — along with Phoebe, Janika, Maya, and Dean — who have gathered at the end of May 1999 to celebrate Anatol’s thirtieth birthday. Anatol was supposed to pick up Janika at the train station, but he ran a mysterious errand, forcing Janika to walk to his house after she tired of waiting for him. Janika begins to think that Anatol doesn’t want her there, but why?

As a birthday gift, Anatol wants his five guests to join him in a game. After writing their names on two slips of paper and placing them in separate bowls, each player draws one name from each bowl. One name is a killer and the other is a murder victim. Each player must write a murder mystery, describing how the killer does away with the victim.

Shortly before Anatol’s birthday, his addled and creepy father Gus was electrocuted in the bath while listening to the radio. Anatol’s friends suspect that Gus was murdered but Anatol has an alibi. Anyway, although nobody liked Gus, Anatol’s motive is unclear. Although Anatol will inherit his father’s house, he’ll need to sell it to pay the inheritance tax.

The weekend passes slowly. Some guests have the hots for each other. Anatole has been sleeping with Maya every few months. Dean is married to Yulie (who had an affair of her own) and seizes the weekend opportunity to shag her sister Phoebe. Dean needs to tell Phoebe that Yulie is pregnant but has trouble finding the right time. One of the characters says “Everyone’s sleeping with everyone. This is like a soap opera.” Fortunately, it’s not, although the characters' sexual escapades add litle to the story.

Multiple murders occur during the course of the weekend. A character is thrown out a window. Another is impaled on a sundial. Another dies in a fire. But are the murders real or just the stories that the guests wrote for the game? And which guests wrote which stories? Separating fictional reality from fictional fiction is the interesting challenge that Alex Pavesi poses to the reader.

As the reader tries to puzzle out whether any of the murders are real, other crimes complicate the plot. Characters receive unsigned letters that might be interpreted as blackmail threats. The letter to Anatol says I HAVE PHOTOS. Phoebe’s says I KNOW. Phoebe wonders if her letter might have come from Yulie or from Yulie’s friend Maya, who is also Phoebe’s best friend.

Marcin’s letter says INSIDER TRADING. When Marcin receives his letter, he assumes the insider trading that made him rich has been discovered. But the only person to whom he confessed his crime was Maya, who thought the crime was too boring to discuss with anyone else. Or maybe that’s just what she's telling Marcin.

Perhaps someone is trying to blackmail Maya with nude photos in lurid poses that an old boyfriend took of her (back in the innocent 90s when nudity was scandalous). Are the photos real or part of another story?

Ink Ribbon Red benefits from a carefully constructed plot. The story is clever. Perhaps too clever. The blackmail plot, once revealed, seems impossibly complicated. The blackmail victims could have been blackmailed without gathering for a story-writing weekend. Pavesi juggles the timelines, a common literary device, but one that has no obvious purpose here, apart from adding to the confusion. There are two true murders among all the imagined killings, but neither will shock the reader. The reader will suspect the truth behind one death from the novel’s early moments, while the other seems contrived to justify all the fictional killing that precedes it. A final death (not a murder) is both contrived and hard to swallow.

Nor is this a story that will encourage the reader’s emotional investment in any character. They could all be murdered and the reader would probably greet their demise with indifference. I recommend Ink Ribbon Red for its unique construction and noteworthy prose, but this isn’t a novel I would expect most readers to rave about.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS