Milne's Red House Mystery, Anthony Berkeley Cox's Malice Aforethought, James M. Murders, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, Ira Levin’s Death Trap, A. The titles were chosen from among the best of the best-including Agatha Christie’s A.

Years ago, bookseller and mystery aficionado Malcolm Kershaw compiled a list of the genre’s most unsolvable murders, those that are almost impossible to crack-which he titled “Eight Perfect Murders,” Interesting, but Mal’s POV is not my cup of tea.A chilling tale of psychological suspense and an homage to the thriller genre tailor-made for fans: the story of a bookseller who finds himself at the center of an FBI investigation because a very clever killer has started using his list of fiction’s most ingenious murders. The parts that were interesting to me were of course, the copycat murders and the comparison between literary murders and real life ones. I suppose because I love emotional character development and Mal was a walking ice cube it didn’t work for me as well (although as I said before, if we had more of his POV and cluelessness around other people’s reactions that would have kept my interest.) I also got a tad bit bored with a lot of passages of Mal making appointments at bars, Mal ordering drinks, Mal getting up and walking through passages and downstairs, etc. I wished there had been more of Mal remarking that his female employee never smiled and laughed with him like she did with his male employee, or his long-time acquaintances having a clue that he was probably not the best choice for an extra marital seduction (and Mal’s interpretation of that seduction could have been great if it happened earlier in the book before we kind of new who was guilty and who wasn’t).

The bookstore order, Mal, gives hints throughout that he’s an unreliable narrator, and I do love unreliable narrators, and Swanson does his best to explain Mal’s emotionally isolated POV by having Mal tell us how a wall seems to come up between him and other people after knowing them for a short while, but telling us he lacks emotional connection isn’t as fun as figuring that out from the reactions of people around him. Swanson does a good job of making the literary tour through murders good for even less well-read mystery fans like myself as he gives just enough explanation to make it understandable. Eight Perfect Murders (Malcolm Kershaw #1)Ī book store owner writes a blog called “the perfect murders” and lists 8 from famous real life novels such as Deathtrap, Malice Aforethought, Strangers on a Train, etc.

Peter swanson 8 perfect murders