The Last Murder At The End Of The World
By Stuart Turton
Fiction/Raven Books (Bloomsbury Publishing)/Paperback/400 pages/$29.72/ Amazon SG (amzn.asia/d/7tBlT4d)
3 stars
Humanity teeters on the brink of extinction. Unless a murder is solved within the next 92 hours, a fog will devour an island, wiping out its last survivors.
In this ticking time bomb, we meet Stuart Turton’s third and latest cast of characters – a group of 122 villagers and three scientists, living together in uneasy harmony. The British author, best known for his award-winning debut, The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018), is back with another inventive mystery novel, The Last Murder At The End Of The World.
After a relatively slow start, things get off to a steady sprint when a key figure dies under mysterious circumstances. There is thrilling urgency to the brisk narrative, reinforced by an ominous countdown that punctuates the novel and reminds the reader of what is at stake.
But what, really, is at stake? If all that remains of humanity are an underdeveloped trio, a bunch of background actors shuffling around like non-playable characters in a video game and the most insufferable elderly people on the planet, is it truly worth all that trouble?
There is some attempt to flesh out the main character Emory, a social outcast whose blunt inquisitiveness lands her the role of head detective. Together with her grumpy middle-aged father Seth and gifted but boring teenage daughter Clara, she has to solve the mystery and rebuild her fractious relationship with each family member in the process. It is a commendable stab at complexity, though their family dynamics are explored with varying degrees of success.
Working with – and sometimes against – this family are two of the elders: Thea, a haughty crone with a penchant for withering cruelty, and Hephaestus, a brute so huge one villager jokes that the only way to sculpt him “would be to start chipping away at the volcano behind the village”.
Both elders have an air of tortured melancholy about them, born of hardship endured in the years before they were forced onto this island.
But the novel tries to command sympathy for them without properly delving into their backstories or even establishing the cause of the apocalypse beyond vague imagery – “huge sinkholes” just “appeared on every continent, swallowing entire cities”, apparently.
Oh, and then there is Abi, the all-seeing, artificial intelligence presence that pops up once in a while to disrupt the narrative. Yes, it is just as jarring as it sounds.
Most of the novel’s space is devoted instead to the turn-by-turn unfolding of the plot, which proves to be its saving grace.
Turton throws in enough twists and revelations to keep readers on knife-edge, pumping the action full of the breathless dynamism that made his previous works such smash hits.
Despite my irritation with the characters, I find myself hooked, speeding towards an ending that does its best to answer the flurry of questions raised by earlier chapters.
But it also has loftier ambitions: Turton moves beyond the rapidly narrowing confines of his island to tackle issues of free will and morality, weaving them into a denouement that feels ill-equipped to handle such weight.
It is teased from the very start of the novel. In the prologue, one of the elders says: “I’ve spent ninety years trying to rid humanity of its selfishness, greed and its impulse towards violence. Finally, I have a way to do it.”
About 400 pages later, the solution is finally revealed. If only it were not so dependent on the merit of characters who have done little to inspire hope for the future of humankind.
If you like this, read: The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (Raven Books, 2018, $20.12, Amazon SG, go to amzn.asia/d/3e6bl0Q). Turton’s mind-bending debut is still his best work to date. In this 544-page tome, a protagonist is doomed to relive the same party through the eyes of a different attendee every night. He has eight days to solve a murder – only then will he be allowed to leave.
