Ink Ribbon Red by Alex Pavesi Narrator: Dino Fetscher
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 320
Length: 7 hours and 38 minutes
Published by Henry Holt and Co., Macmillan Audio on July 22, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A wickedly plotted new thriller, in which a group of friends play a deadly game that unwraps a motive for murder, from Alex Pavesi, the author of The Eighth Detective.
Anatol invites five of his oldest friends to his family home in the Wiltshire countryside to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. At his request, they play a game of his invention called Motive Method Death. The rules are simple: Everyone chooses two players at random, then writes a short story in which one kills the other.
Points are awarded for making the murders feel real. Of course, it’s only natural for each friend to use what they know. Secrets. Grudges. Affairs. But once they’ve put it in a story, each secret is out. It’s not long before the game reawakens old resentments and brings private matters into the light of day. With each fictional crime, someone new gets a very real motive.
Can all six friends survive the weekend, or will truth turn out to be deadlier than fiction?
My Review:
Characters in mystery thrillers would probably have longer life expectancies if they read more mystery thrillers. It would make them aware that the very last thing you should do if you observe one of your friends acting suspiciously is to tell that person that you are aware that they are acting suspiciously and that you plan to inform the police about it.
Which generally results in that act of informing the suspicious person of their suspicious behavior turning into the last thing you EVER do. Because of course they do you in first.
That’s the way that a lot of the stories within stories inside the story of Ink Ribbon Red turn out. Fictionally, that is. Not just because the book itself is, of course, fiction, but because the stories within the story are intended to be fictional within the story.
Except for the ones that aren’t after all.
It’s Anatol’s 30th birthday, and just like every year since they all met at uni, Anatol, Dean, Janika, Marcin, Maya and Phoebe plan to spend the Spring Bank Holiday weekend together at Anatol’s country house in Tisbury, not far west of Salisbury and its paleolithic neighbor Stonehenge.
But this year is going to be different. They’ve all been – or are about to be – turning 30 this year, and it feels like their friendship is winding down or burning out or they’re just pulling their separate ways in adulthood.
Or, it could just be that, as Marcin believed, “friendship was often just a sign of shared history, or an indication of a few common interests,” and the ties that bound this group together through their 20s are fraying and snapping.
Definitely snapping, as it doesn’t seem like these people even like each other anymore. More like all that sharing and familiarity has bred what familiarity is famous for breeding – contempt.
Anatol believes that this will be their last gathering. The big house, filled with antiques, belonged to his father, who died in rather suspicious circumstances the month before. Anatol believes that the group is just hanging around because he has that big country house – which he’s about to lose to paying death duties.
So he plans to go out with a bang. Possibly a literal one. Certainly a literary one. Anatol intends to use the indulgence, however reluctant, engendered by his birthday to manipulate everyone into playing a little game. A game Anatol himself invented called Motive, Method, Death.
Anatol has already won the first round. The others just don’t know it. Yet.
Escape Rating B: While I may have picked this up because I liked the author’s first book, The Eighth Detective, the experience of reading put me in the same headspace as The Atlas Six. Meaning that I hated every single one of the characters (I’m pretty sure they all hate each other, too) but was absolutely compelled to finish the book.
(If you’ve been wondering what the hate read/listen I’ve been referring to for the past week might have been, this was definitely it!)
I listened to this one, and I’m completely neutral on the narrator because I hated all the characters so much that the feelings bled over into how I felt about him. I tried reading this in text, just to get it over with quicker, but the audio worked better than the voice in my own head.
Looking back, I thought the author’s first book, The Eighth Detective, was like a nesting doll. A story within a story, then a whole bunch of stories within a story. Only for the little tiny doll – or story – in the end to get really, really big and swallow all the other stories in the set.
Ink Ribbon Red isn’t exactly like that – except where it is. It is a story about stories, but the stories aren’t so much within each other as beside each other. Because the game requires that each person write a story about murder. Because Anatol is playing them all, he’s already written several stories to tell the story he wants to tell.
And we’re not sure, until the end, which were theirs, which were his, which were imaginary – and which really happened. So a lot of the characters get murdered several times over, but I hated them all so much I didn’t care that any – or for that matter all – might or might not be dead.
It’s a bit Inception – if you squint a LOT. It’s a bit more And Then There Were None, but that doesn’t convey the sense of the mental wtf’ery that Inception brings to the table.
Back when I read The Eighth Detective, I liked the stories within the story but the frame didn’t quite stick firmly to the wall. This time around the frame gets stuck in with a butcher knife, hacked to pieces with a chainsaw, and set on fire. OTOH, the individual stories were all over the place, a bit uneven, jarring to read and even more shocking when the victim turned up alive in the next chapter because no one, including the reader, knows fact from fiction until the very end.
In the end I’m glad I stuck with this one – although I’m equally glad it’s over. I don’t ever want to have to think about any of these characters ever again.
