DYSTOPIAN MURDER MYSTERY: THE LAST MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD

How does Stuart Turton keep doing this?  Every one of his books is wildly different from the others.  First he writes one of the most brilliant, complicated mystery novels I’ve ever read, The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.  Then, for something almost completely different, he writes The Devil and the Dark Water, a historical novel set at sea with supernatural overtones (and also murder).  And now he’s written The Last Murder at the End of the World, which is a dystopian, speculative fiction novel (which obviously also has a murder).  Each one of these books is an amazing, compelling read that touches on larger questions while spinning a complicated, surprising plot that understands the genre conventions but subverts them.  The only thing these books have in common is that they involve murder one way or another and they trip your expectations up completely.  Turton is a wonderful writer and it’s beginning to seem as if no genre is beyond his skills.

I’ve already written how eager I was to read The Last Murder at the End of the World.  The premise is outstanding: there was a disastrous fog that killed just about all life on the planet, including most human beings.  There is one island which is protected against the fog, and the remnant of humanity lives there, about a hundred villagers and three scientists who are the leaders of the community. One of the scientists is found dead, apparently murdered.  What makes this unprecedented act even worse is that the scientist’s death turns off the machinery that keeps the fog away, so unless they can solve the mystery, the fog will engulf the island and kill everyone within 107 hours (ticking time bomb, anyone?).  AND, because that’s not enough to get us really going, everyone on the island has had their memories wiped of the last 24 hours, so even the murderer doesn’t know if they did it.

The book itself is even better than the premise promises.  We spend a lot of time leading up to the death of Niema, the scientist, learning about how this society works, and how nobody among the villagers (except Emory, who’s our protagonist) ever questions anything the scientists/elders do or say.  There are mysteries lurking in the background from the outset, starting with the nature of the island, the reason why all the villagers die by the time they’re 60 (if they didn’t already die of disease or in an accident before that), the question of why one of the villagers has been exiled from the community for the last five years, and the relationships among the three Elders.  

And talk about your omniscient narrator!  Here our narrator is Abi, an artificial intelligence who is present in the minds of all the villagers and scientists, who was designed by Niema to control everything and push everyone in the right direction, and who has an agenda of her own which doesn’t necessarily correlate with Niema’s, despite Niema’s having created her.  Abi knows everything and can talk in everyone’s mind, but she doesn’t choose to tell anyone the whole truth, at least not at first.

Revelations about the island, the fog, the relationship between the villagers and the elders, and what the villagers are actually doing spring at you frequently, causing you to rethink what you believed you knew about the society and the world. The surprises are genuine but they also make sense when you look back (the best kind of twists, in my opinion), and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun of discovering them for yourself.

Suffice it to say the characters are vivid and well-drawn, they act in ways that are reasonable for their backgrounds and circumstances, and that several times in the book you will think you know who the murderer is, only to discover that you’re wrong, as are the characters themselves.  The plot, as I’ve come to expect from Turton, is intricate and detailed and incredibly clever, the kind of plot where you have to sit down and take a number of deep breaths and think about the whole thing right after you finish it. 

If you’re ready for an immersive, fascinating reading experience that will upend your expectations, check out The Last Murder at the End of the World.  Even if you think you don’t like science fiction or post-apocalyptic novels or mysteries, you will still find something intriguing in this terrific book.

I CAN’T WAIT!

I am so lucky to be the person ordering fiction at my library!  It’s one of my favorite parts of the job (actually, I have a lot of favorite parts of the job, as anyone who’s worked with me will attest), and one reason is that I get the big picture of what’s coming out and when, and I get that information almost before anyone else.  I try to use my powers for good and not for evil (no guarantees on that, though), though I do make a point of putting things on hold as soon as they’re in the system (being in the system has some privileges, after all).

These are the books I’m most looking forward to reading during the month of May.  They’re all over the place (as is my taste), but if any of these possibilities strikes you as interesting, too, I’m happy to share them.  They’re all by people I’ve read and enjoyed before (one is even a sequel to a book I loved), so they get to the top of my TBR list if for those reasons alone.

First in time is Blood on the Tide by Katee Robert, coming out on May 14.  I read one of her Neon Gods books and enjoyed it, but the real reason I want to read this one is because of the plot (and characters).  We have a vampire who’s out to get back some priceless family heirlooms, but she can’t get them by herself for reasons (already a female vampire is intriguing to me), so she rescues a selkie who’s being held captive, and the selkie needs help getting back her skin which was stolen from her (and we have a selkie, one of my favorite mythological creatures, another reason for my enthusiasm).  There’s a relationship between the two of them, though it’s not necessarily an easy one, the vampire being more likely to kill than kiss, and the selkie being kind of afraid of the vampire.  And then add to the mix that the two of them are chasing a ship belonging to the spectral hounds of the otherworld, and you now have another group of characters that fascinates me.  Obviously, since the book hasn’t come out yet, I don’t know how well Robert will pull it off, but I have faith in her writing from the last outing.  Stay tuned to see if it’s as much fun as it sounds.

Then we have two books coming out on May 21.  The first is a mystery by an author whose mysteries are genre-benders and brain teasers.  I refer, of course, to Stuart Turton, whose books The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle  and The Devil and Dark Water were terrific reads (albeit very different in settings).  His newest one, which I am eager to jump into, is called The Last Murder at the End of the World, and if his name on the cover weren’t enough to get me interested, the title would.  But (of course) it gets better: all the world has been destroyed by this mysterious fog, except for this one island, populated by normal people and three scientists.  Everything is okay until one of the scientists is brutally murdered AND the murder triggered a lowering of the security system that was keeping the fog at bay, so the characters have 107 hours to solve the murder before the fog kills them all AND the security system wiped everybody’s memories, so one of the people is a murderer, and doesn’t even know it.  Now I ask you: does this or does this not sound like a book you dive into and follow wherever it leads?  I know Turton is going to make this a nail-biter and a twisted read, and I am totally there for it.

And the last of the three is a book that’s breaking my usual rule about sequels to perfectly wonderful books that don’t need a sequel (my rule is: they’re usually a bad idea).  The book is The Guncle Abroad, by Steven Rowley.  I absolutely loved The Guncle (and honestly I have trouble imagining how anyone could NOT love it), which would ordinarily make me a little more wary about a sequel, except that Patrick O’Hara (the Guncle of the title) is such a wonderful character that I just want to spend more time with him no matter what. The story starts five years after The Guncle, and once again Patrick is called into the family fray, when his brother is about to remarry and Patrick’s nephew and niece are not happy about the new member of the family, even though the wedding is going to take place in Italy.  Patrick shepherds them through Europe on their way to the wedding, trying to teach them about love the way he taught them about grief in the first book, and then of course, when you get to the wedding itself, there are all sorts of complications, familial and otherwise.  I’m trusting this book to be the one that breaks the curse of unnecessary sequels, but we will have to check it out and see.

If these possibilities intrigue you, by all means go to the library and put them on hold (but be warned : you’ll be getting them after I do, because I’ve already got these three on hold), and have fun.