INK RIBBON RED

Death brings a long-standing annual tradition to an ignominious end.

For many years, Anatol, an antiques dealer, has been hosting his friends—five idiosyncratic Londoners—at his house in Wiltshire on the occasion of his birthday. It’s now 1999, and a few weeks before Anatol is to turn 30, his father dies at the house; as one of the friends, who has volunteered to share the news with the group, explains to another, there was “an accident…He electrocuted himself in the bath, listening to the radio.” “But that doesn’t sound like an accident at all,” observes another friend (channeling the reader), who can’t resist remarking that Anatol stands to come into an inheritance now. Anatol soldiers on with hosting the gathering, although from the jump, readers are informed that “the weekend would end with Anatol’s death, early on Monday.” The key questions—how did Anatol die, and was his father murdered?—are teased across the length of the book, which has a jagged chronology, a leap-about point of view, and a mountain of misdirection thanks to the truth-averse cast and a parlor game of Anatol’s twisted invention in which players must write stories about one another’s hypothetical deaths. Which of the scenes reproduced herein are the products of Anatol’s game, and which scenes actually happened? The novel will likely divide readers: While the story requires much mental exertion, the ending doesn’t quite live up to the setup’s Christie-esque promise, and yet Pavesi is a fiendishly good, deliberate, and entertaining writer who augments his whimsical-macabre narrative with wordplay, amusingly barbed exchanges, and menacing figurative language—a typewriter makes “the sound of mousetraps snapping shut.”

This book is a workout, but for many readers it will be worth it.