(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
Could it be possible that the whodunnit can be reborn at the very end of the world?
Well, to be fair, in the case of the inimitable Stuart Turton that happened a number of years back with the head-scratchingly brilliant The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018) and The Devil and the Dark Water (2020), but with his latest novel, The Last Murder at the End of the World, he not only manages to breathe even more fresh life into the venerable whodunnit genre but give it even more embellishments with the supernatural, the apocalyptic and some tastily thoughtful social commentary coming along for one hell of an against-the-clock sleuthing ride.
It’s fantastically clever and enthrallingly good but what’s even more impressive is that with all the excitingly clever plotting and narrative weaving going on that Turton manages to never once lost sight of his characters or the raw humanity that impels on a quest whose successful resolution may not just find a killer but also avoid the death of everything good left alive in the world.
In this sort of-near future Earth, humanity has been reduced to a rump population of just 122 people, all of them on an island in the Mediterranean where the dark, black fog that wiped the rest of life off into the nameless wilds of oblivion is held back by a mysterious shield.
‘The greatest achievements have always brought the greatest risk,’ she [Niema] says stubbornly, watching a line of figures walking stiffly in the darkness. ‘Start your countdown, Abi. In four days we’re either going to change the world, or die trying.’
Life is as idyllic as it can be when you’re all that’s left of the human race, the descendants of the desperate people who were able to make it to this highly unusual sanctuary before life was erased.
The villagers of the island spend their days planting and harvesting in the fields, celebrating important days and sleeping when curfew arrives, all of them drifting into the realm of Mr Sandman en masse by strange means that no one fully understands but which they accept because it has always been thus.
Along with the villagers are three scientists aka the elders, all that is left of an outpost that offered the only real hope of beating the scourge of the fog but which now lies locked away deep in the hollowed-out centre of the island.
The scientists tell the villagers what to do, the villagers contentedly do it and life continues on in an untroubled, bucolic way, everyone pretending the fog is held off just offshore and that they are safe for as long as they need to be.
Safe, that is, until one of the scientists turns up dead, very, very catastrophically dead.
As if that isn’t bad enough, it turns out that the death of the scientist has triggered a lowering of the security barrier, meaning that unless the murder is solved in 107 hours, that last bastion of life on Earth will be gone, baby gone, and that will be that for the once verdant blue planet.
Talk about a ticking clock of doom.
With an air of apocalyptic Miss Marple in work boots about it, The Last Murder at the End of the World then becomes a heartstoppingly thrilling, fiendishly clever race to a very final finish line, with the one person in the village whose willing to ask questions and buck the established, Emory, given the job of solving the mystery to end all mysteries.
Complicating things for her, and everyone else to be fair, is that the same security system that’s now spectacularly on the fritz, also wiped their memories of the fateful night the scientist was murdered when, a mass of messy evidence around them would suggest, all kinds of strange and inexplicable, weird and not-so-wonderful things went down.
It would be easy to panic but Emory mostly manages to keep her cool, and so begins the whodunnit of all whodunnits, a race to not only solve a murder but also to perhaps to explain how the world ended up in this mess to begin with.
If that sounds like a lot of narrative plate spinning for one book, you’d be right BUT The Last Murder at the End of the World seems to manage it all effortlessly, stacking up clue after clue, with, of course, the occasional red herring thrown in for good measure, and serving it up with some thriller-level reveals and plot twists worthy of Hitchcock or M. Night Shyamalan.
Turton honestly doesn’t put a foot wrong, his deft balancing of in-depth exposition, intimate character and societal study and a whodunnit with one hell of a deadline coming together so flawlessly you will be in awe of how one person can be this damned brilliant.
Emory shakes her head. ‘Every time Jack’s name is mentioned I do something stupid, but we can’t afford that any more. We need to work out who killed Niema, and every clue we have so far points towards the lighthouse.’
And he is brilliant, as his absolute riot of a book, which may not be a ton of fun for everyone involved in the story but which undeniably enthrallingly and beguilingly good for everyone who has the privilege and joy to read a book which, for all its dark intent and apocalyptic doom, feels like a buoyant thrill to read.
It’s rare that a book this intelligently crafted and clearly very well thought out can feel so grounded and accessibly, affectingly human, but it does, combining stellar writing with an incisive ability to dissect what makes us and our society, or what’s left of it in this instance, tick.
News flash! It’s not all that good; it’s not so much the murder that gives that away since it’s a given that killing someone else is not exactly a civilisational highlight, but the many things that emerge over the course of Emory’s deductive tour de force across, next to and through the underground heart of the island which not only eventually gives a killer but make it patently clear that something is, indeed rotten in the metaphorically apocalyptic state of Denmark.
You will come to love Emory, be appalled by the callousness of some of the characters and energised by a whodunnit which is astoundingly and breathlessly involving, imaginative as hell and complex to the nth degree and yet accessible in a way that makes its solution, even if you haven’t arrived at it first, so incredibly satisfying and worth the time you put into reading this breathtakingly good book.