This is an interesting book but I’m not sure I “enjoyed” it which is disappointing because I really wanted to.  I’d read maybe half off the book which are used as plot device but that’s’ not really a big deal if you pay attention.. Those books are lightly described.  

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Eight Perfect Murders
By Peter Swanson
2019 / 288 pages
read by Graham Halstead – 8h 3m
rating – A
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This is an interesting book but I’m not sure I “enjoyed” it which is disappointing because I really wanted to.  I’d read maybe half off the book which are used as plot device but that’s’ not really a big deal if you pay attention.. Those books are lightly described.  

The book opens when Malcolm Kershaw, the owner of mystery book store in Boston,  is visited by an FBI agent.  She’s is looking into a series of murders which seem to be related to a column Kershaw wrote a few years prior. The column lists 8 mystery novels which describe “perfect” murders.    As we read along we sense from the narrator’s voice that something is wrong . And then we find out that his wife was murdered and that he is lying  to the FBI agent.  They team up to investigate finding more murders and then it turns bloody with one guy standing out. 

The book is quite interesting on one level and that’s the “who-done-it” puzzler which is one of the binding factors in the eight murder books.  The books seem to be characters or suspects mass they each point to one or another victim, suspect and it did keep me guessing – mostly.  

There allusions to other mystery books but the ones  involved most heavily are: Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, Ira Levin’s Death Trap, A. A. Milne’s Red House Mystery, Anthony Berkeley Cox’s Malice Aforethought, James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, John D. Macdonald’s The Drowner, and Donna Tartt’s A Secret History.