V171 reviewed Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton
None
3 stars
Though a noticeable step down from his other works, The Last Murder at the End of the World was a fairly compelling, often confusing, twist on the whodunnit murder mystery.
It's the end of the world. Humanity is corralled onto one small island, surrounded by deadly fog and insects that are held back by a force field maintained by an AI, Abi, that was developed by some of the last humans from old humanity, and currently lives in everyone's heads. We follow a few characters: Emory is our primary detective, with her daughter Clara serving as our Watson, and are common villagers living in this last bastion of humanity. Thea, Hephestus,and Niema are elders of the village, and with each being over 100 years old, they are the final individuals of the old world who have memories of what the world was like before the fog. When one of them …
Though a noticeable step down from his other works, The Last Murder at the End of the World was a fairly compelling, often confusing, twist on the whodunnit murder mystery.
It's the end of the world. Humanity is corralled onto one small island, surrounded by deadly fog and insects that are held back by a force field maintained by an AI, Abi, that was developed by some of the last humans from old humanity, and currently lives in everyone's heads. We follow a few characters: Emory is our primary detective, with her daughter Clara serving as our Watson, and are common villagers living in this last bastion of humanity. Thea, Hephestus,and Niema are elders of the village, and with each being over 100 years old, they are the final individuals of the old world who have memories of what the world was like before the fog. When one of them falls dead, the force field turns off, and Emory has only two days to solve the murder to stop the end of their village and the end of humanity itself. But with all of the secrets the elders hold from the rest of the village, is humanity worth saving after all?
I generally love Turton's creative twists on such a classic murder mystery genre. Seven Deaths was one of my favorite reads of the year, and Devil and the Dark Water was also fantastic, so I had really high hopes for this walking into it, which was probably my first mistake. I could see what he was trying to do here, I could see the interesting narrative that he was trying to weave. But the execution was just a bit of a mess. Most chapters were just focused around conversations between two characters where massive amounts of information, red herrings, and clues were thrown at the reader. It wasn't done in a way that made anything easy to keep track of. Character motivations were all over the place, sometimes two characters seemed to have a friendly relationship, but in the next scene it was outright hostile. The unraveling of the mystery combined with the slow reveal of the world building and the breakneck change in location and scenery just made this feel exhausting.
And all for what? The payoff wasn't really there. The Big Reveal wasn't satisfying, I could have probably guessed it towards the beginning, but guessing the end isn't bad in and of itself, its seeing all of the clues slot into place that is satisfying. But here it felt like all of the clues were shoved into place, at the end of it I was just kind of scratching my head like.. okay well I guess that was that..
Also, I wrote this in my first update, but I can't stand it when chapter titles of a book are directly relevant to what is going on in the narrative, for example here, the three sections of the book are titled "X hours until the end of humanity", with the count slowly going down. However, when these chapter titles are put into a table of contents, it very clearly spoils the story. Just forgo a TOC!