Block transmission systems allow transmissions of N symbols simultaneously, with single carrier or multi-carrier modulation. Maximum likelihood optimal reception in multipath channels have a high computational cost of AN, where A is the constellation order (A iqual 2 for BPSK). To avoid this cost is usual to make symbol-by-symbol detection after equalization. In this work we propose a receiver with group detection that has a good tradeof between computation complexity and bit error rate performance. The idealized structure groups the components of the equalized block in sub-blocks and does optimal joint detection of the symbols in each sub-block. With relation to possible grouping strategies three methods were proposed. The first one searchs for an optimal grouping and has, as a consequence, a high computational cost for block with a large number of symbols. Sub-optimal efficient algorithms that avoid the exhaustive search for the optimal grouping but show good performance gains and feasible application in systems with large number of symbols per block were proposed. The resulted receivers achieved substantial performance gain in comparison with the conventional symbol-by-symbol receiver.