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

The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 4, 2020

What defines a murder mystery? The Eighth Detective explores that question, and even provides examples of the definition’s permutations, in a plot that seems to be one thing and turns out to be something quite different.

Before his retirement, Grant McAllister was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. A fan of murder mysteries, McAllister authored a paper in 1937 that purports to define the mathematical structure of murder mysteries in all their variations. To illustrate some of the key principles of his definition, McAllister wrote seven stories. In the 1940s, he collected the stories and the paper in a self-published volume called The White Murders.

The reader is told that the long-forgotten volume came into the hands of a small press publisher who thought it deserved an audience. He dispatches an editor, Julie Hart, to track down McAllister, who seems to have isolated himself on a Mediterranean island. Hart discusses the stories and the mathematical paper with McAllister in a series of interviews.

The Eighth Detective opens with the first short story that appears in The White Murders. The next chapter relates Hart’s discussion of the story with McAllister. The book then alternates short stories with discussions until it reaches the final discussion, in which Hart reveals the solution to a separate mystery that she has uncovered.

Alex Pavesi scores points for inventing such a clever concept. The stories are ordinary murder mysteries, some better than others. None are particularly impressive but none are unworthy of publication. As Hart reads them to McAllister, she spotlights inconsistencies in the text and wonders whether they are deliberate. McAllister’s answers are vague. At the novel’s end, we learn that we have been deceived about the stories in a way that I won’t spoil. The deception is critical to the plot and to a full understanding of the stories themselves.

The math in the research paper that Hart finds so complex consists of nothing more than Venn diagrams. McAllister defines every murder mystery in terms of four ingredients. With one exception, a story that lacks any of those ingredients is not a true murder mystery. Unsurprisingly, a murder mystery requires at least one murder victim, at least one killer, at least two suspects, and typically (but not inevitably) someone who solves the crime. The categories overlap, so that (for example) the detective or the victim might also be the murderer. McAllister also believes that the main structural variations of mystery stories can be broken down into archetypes. The stories are meant to illustrate seven of those.

Murder mysteries often depend on surprise endings (in many, the killer is the person we least suspect), a convention that, Hart opines, has carried over into the broader crime novel genre, even as traditional murder mysteries have diminished in popularity. The Eighth Detective follows that convention by serving up a couple of surprise endings. One changes the reader’s understanding of Hart (just as Hart changes the reader’s understanding of McAllister), while the other wraps up some dangling clues to an unsolved crime that Hart discovers in The White Murders.

Cleverness is its own reward in crime fiction. If The Eighth Detective didn’t blow me away, and if the “mathematical” analysis of murder mysteries seems a bit simplistic, those faults are easily overshadowed by Pavesi’s careful attention to storytelling details that create, in the end, an inventive novel that is both a murder mystery and a different kind of mystery — the story of two protagonists who each endeavor to keep secrets from the other for reasons of their own.

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