“The Last Murder At The End Of The World” by Stuart Turton (2024)

“‘Is there no other way?’ asks a horrified Niema Mandripilias, speaking out loud in an empty room.”

There are only a handful of authors I actively long for more work from. With Agatha Christie and Douglas Adams both no longer going concerns, that leaves me with Jasper Fforde and Stuart Turton. Fortunately they’re both releasing new books this year – and even better, I’ve been lucky enough to read them in advance! Here’s the newest from Turton; a brand new murder mystery like only he could write.

The world ended when a black fog swept across the planet, killing everything it touched. Now, decades on, the only survivors live on an idyllic Greek island, trapped but cohabiting in peaceful harmony. The 122 villagers and three scientists are all that’s left of the human race. The villagers are happy to abide by the rules of the scientists, working to keep the island running and everyone fed, and even obey their nightly curfew, and in return the scientists keep the technology running that keeps the island safe.

But then, the unthinkable. Into this peaceful world is thrust the concept of murder when one of the scientists is found stabbed to death. This event has also triggered the lowering of the security system, and the fog is now encroaching on the island and the last people in the world. If the murder isn’t solved within 92 hours, everyone is going to be dead. It’s up to Emory and her family to find the answer and save everyone, and everything, they know. But in doing so, they might discover that their world perhaps isn’t as wholesome as it has always appeared.

So, first up, congratulations are in order. In a world that so desperately wants to keep spoon-feeding us the same ideas over and over again, Stuart Turton has, for the third time, come up with something wonderfully inventive and original. All of his books are brilliantly constructed, and while I enjoy them all a lot, it also makes me a little sad because I can’t help but think about how many other unique books we’re missing out on because publishing houses are still too busy commissioning books about old people solving crime, women killing their husbands, and celebrity memoirs. (I’m writing this review in November 2023, perhaps it’s all changed by March 2024 but I doubt it – publishing trends linger.)

The plot took me a moment to get into, because you open with a lot of unanswered questions. Actually, you end with quite a few, too. But that’s OK. Sometimes it’s interesting to know how the world got like it did in a dystopian future, but here, so much time has based since the nominal “end of the world”, it’s not important anymore. We know there’s a fog that kills anyone who touches it, but we don’t really need to know why. You discover quite early on that the villagers are not human, and you can garner this from earlier hints, too, but there are no obvious explanations as to how the human scientists are living so long. None of it feels important though – the key part of the story is the murder mystery element, and that’s very cleverly done.

The narration is also interesting, as the book is told from the point of view of Abi, an artificial intelligence that all the villagers have in their heads. Abi can control them to some degree, but also serves as someone they can ask questions to, seek comfort from, and understand what they need to be doing. Although theoretically benevolent, we quickly realise that she’s probably not as innocent as it first appears, but is working on a logic that is more computer than human. Her instructions have been given and she cannot deviate from them. Having her as a narrator means that we can spend time with various characters, but still experience their emotions in close quarters.

It’s a fun, exciting and unique book, and really that’s all I’m looking for. If you’re sharp, you’ll see some of the reveals coming, but I promise you that you won’t see all of them. Get hold of this one fast. And if you’ve not read Turton’s other books, do yourself a favour and get them too. I hope his career only goes up from here.

“Red Side Story” by Jasper Fforde (2024)

“My name is Eddie Russett, but only for another two hours and nine minutes.”

Thirteen years we’ve been waiting, so time to see if it was worth it. I was very, very lucky to be able to read an advanced copy of this in September 2023, but I’ve set the date on this post so it won’t come out until the official release date, just so I can talk a little more freely about things that happen.

The book opens a couple of weeks after the first one ended. Eddie and Violet’s engagement is well known, but he continues to fraternise with Jane, who is now Green, and therefore their relationship is entirely taboo. Elsewhere, Mr Celadine has arrived to head up an “impartial” assessment of the death of Courtland Gamboge, which Eddie continues to claim was not his fault, and preparations are underway for the next Jollity Fair.

With Eddie and Jane threatened with execution in only a matter of days, it seems like a bad time to start learning more about the world. First there’s the revelation that the Fallen Man wasn’t a man after all, then yet another deMauve plot to foil, and a visit to the abandoned town of Crimsonolia, where Eddie will learn something that will change him forever. Now in possession of the Truth, even if only partially, he must work out how to save himself, Jane, and his friends before everything comes crashing down around them.

I really don’t want to give too much more away, as this is a book many people have been anticipating for a very long time. Fforde is as funny as ever, and does a lot of work expanding the world we found last time, allowing us to see how people learn skills, how border patrol works from the other side, and we even get to learn a lot more about how birth and death works here, including meeting a few infants who are wonderfully surprising. The plot meanders in a pleasing way, ratcheting up the tension until the last few chapters where everything seems to happen at once, the drama increases tenfold, and we finally get some sort of resolution and the sort of answers that only bring about more questions.

So, in short, was it worth it? One hundred and ten per cent. It’s a brilliant sequel. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another thirteen years to find out what happens next.

“Nine Lives” by Peter Swanson (2022)

“Jonathan Grant, unless he let her know ahead of time that he couldn’t make it, always visited on Wednesday evening.”

And where better to end the year than with a twisty murder mystery? Peter Swanson wrote one of my favourite books ever, Rules for Perfect Murders, so it’s time to go back and see if it was just a fluke, or he’s just that good.

One September day, nine people across the United States get a letter in the mail. It’s simply a list of nine names – their own and eight others that they don’t recognise. With this letter, the fates of Matthew, Jay, Ethan, Caroline, Frank, Alison, Arthur, Jack and Jessica are sealed, and a killer gets to work. With some of them taking the list very seriously, and others ignoring it, they begin to die one by one.

The FBI have no leads, and there doesn’t seem to be any connection between the victims, so they just have to hope that the killer slips up somewhere. But whoever is behind these murders is always one step ahead, and is prepared to vary their methods. The victims are shot, beaten, poisoned, gassed and drowned, and it doesn’t seem to matter how safe you are – once you’re on the list, your death is guaranteed.

I wondered how complicated this book might be, given the narrative switches between the nine people on the list, as well as assorted police officers and FBI agents who are dealing with it across the country, but it’s actually not too bad. The characters are all distinct (the police less so than the victims, perhaps) and as it goes on, you get fewer changes anyway. It acknowledges itself that it shares similarities to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, as well as referencing several other crime classics. The mystery is good though, despite the lack of suspects, and the tension remains high as each part ends with someone being killed.

The reveal is good, too, and you can see it coming, but I sort of noticed all the hints with hindsight, simply enjoying being along for the ride. Swanson likes to play with the format of a murder mystery it seems and, while its a genre that relies heavily on formula, it’s fun to see it being shaken up, and there are unexpected moments at every turn.

Really enjoyable, I would recommend.

“Murder On Christmas Eve” by Various (2017)

“He was sitting on top of one of the rear gate-posts of the churchyard when I walked through on Christmas Eve, grooming in his lordly style…”

It’s Christmas! So what else is there to do but pour a mulled wine, grab the Celebrations, and curl up with a nice murder.

This collection brings together the great and good from the worlds of detective fiction and each one has given us a festive mystery to solve. From classic authors like Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr, right up to the likes of Val McDermid, it’s a broad remit. There are new characters too, as well as the likes of Father Brown and John Rebus showing up as well to share their festive treats.

There’s a man who thinks he’s being poisoned by his tea; a missing rare manuscript that a bookseller believes stolen by a party guest; a cat who was the only witness to a murder; a set of footprints in the snow that defy logic; and a spate of poisonings from someone with a very specific grudge.

They’re of mixed quality, as is often the case in anthologies, but they’re generally all good in their own way. It’s fun to see the range of authors rubbing shoulders, actually, as we leap about in time exploring different aspects of the festivities.

If you like your crimes with a Christmas flavour, this is a great place to get yourself started.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

 

“Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates” by Kerry Greenwood (1989)

“The glass in the French window shattered.”

In a rare subversion, I arrive at this book after having long ago devoured the TV series. Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries was a cool, clever series about the aristocratic flapper Phryne Fisher, who works as a private detective in 1920s Melbourne. I really loved it, so thought it was time to dip into the books and see if the magic holds up.

After impressively solving a theft at a dinner party, Phryne Fisher is hired by a retired colonel and his wife to go to Australia, where they believe their daughter is being poisoned by her husband. Phryne, in her typically gung-ho fashion, decides she’ll take the case, but she’ll do it on her own terms. She arrives in Melbourne and sets up in one of the nicest hotels in the city, and begins to make friends around and about. Along with her is her friend Dr MacMillan, a lesbian doctor who is far ahead of her time, but soon too come her new maid Dot, the communist taxi drivers Bert and Cec, Detective Inspector Robinson of the local police, and finally Lydia Andrews, the woman she has been tasked to hunt down.

As Phryne settles herself into Australian high society, she discovers that Lydia’s condition is not the only issue at hand. The city is rife with crime, particularly having to deal with illegal backstreet abortionists and a thriving cocaine trade. Phryne makes it her mission to solve as many problems as she can, but it’s not without risk. Fortunately, few in Australia have a mind like hers…

Phryne Fisher is, without doubt, one of the coolest detectives in fiction. Fashion forward, and unafraid to put herself in the middle of situations, generous to a fault with her associates, and shockingly progressive to those around her, she is absolutely someone you’d want on your side in a fight. Essie Davis’s incredible portrayal of her in the TV series dominates my reading of the book, though, which helps bring her to life all the more. Having spent more time with the characters on screen, I found some of the others weren’t fleshed out enough, but this is the first book in a series, and I don’t know how much it differs from the show.

It’s clearly in the style of Golden Age detective fiction, but being from the late 1980s means that some of the attitudes are slightly better. It’s also not one with a huge focus on murder, with other crimes being at play instead. This is actually somewhat refreshing, and I’ve made up for that with my next read anyway.

I think I’ll carry on with these, and I definitely recommend introducing Phryne Fisher to your reading pile at some point – she’s just really good fun.

“The Fellowship Of Puzzlemakers” by Samuel Burr (2024)

“LTARDBT ID IWT UTAADLHWXE DU EJOOATBPZTGH!”

I’ve always liked a puzzle. Not jigsaw puzzles, actually, I don’t have the patience, but I like a crossword or wordsearch, a dingbat or a logic puzzle. I absolutely love a quiz. So a novel about puzzles feels entirely up my alley.

Clayton Stumper has always been something of an enigma. Dropped as a baby on the doorstep of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, he was raised by a group of older people who all delighted in designing and playing puzzles, and primarily by crossword-setter Pippa Allsbrook. When Pippa dies, Clayton discovers a new puzzle among her possessions, one that might just lead him to the truth of his history. Setting out from the society’s Bedfordshire headquarters, Clayton heads to London to find out who he is, and learn more about the wider world.

But how the commune of puzzle-lovers came to be is another story entirely, and while Clayton is off, we travel back to the 1970s to learn how Pippa gathered everyone together and set about creating a society that felt like a family. Pippa and Clayton are both seeking solace, solutions and security, and their tales run in parallel, giving us an insight into two brilliant minds.

The characters are great, most of them older, which is nice, and comprise all manner of enigmaphiles, including crossword writers, a former employee of Bletchley Park, a maze-maker, a creator of wooden puzzle toys, a jigsaw painter, and a pub quiz genius. It’s nice that the gamut is spread wide, as I think by just focusing on one type of puzzle might have limited the appeal. There is, unsurprisingly, a mystery at the centre of the book (as well as several puzzles for the reader to solve), but it’s the characters that shine for me. Pippa and Clayton, our two primary characters, are endearing and interesting, and you want to know more about them.

The book also explores the role and expectations of women from the 1970s onwards, with the likes of Pippa feeling she’s too old to have the child she wanted and being – originally, at least – judged for being a woman in a, perceived, men’s world. Nancy, another prominent female character, is the second woman to pass The Knowledge and become a London cabbie, which is a nice detail, but she too struggles in a world dominated by men, as well as with a controlling mother. The book also touches neatly, and without fanfare, on sexuality, with a couple of characters realising their true feelings as everyone begins to open up to new experiences. Clayton, as a character, is a great turn, as a young man who has been raised in a commune of older people, meaning he likes sherry, knows nothing about pop music, and explores London and the wider world in the manner of someone who has just arrived on Earth for the first time.

A lovely book, in the vein of The Lido or The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle. It’s just a nice time in good company with low stakes, and sometimes that’s all we need.

“4.50 From Paddington” by Agatha Christie (1957)

“Mrs McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying her suitcase.”

I wasn’t always a Christie obsessive. I can trace the moment it all kicked off to my third year of university. Although the first full book I read was Death in the Clouds, it was the opening chapter of 4.50 from Paddington that was my first proper experience of her. We had a class in which we had to read the start of this book to learn something about introducing a story and, well, it did the job. This is one of the most brilliant openings to any book, never mind just a Christie one.

The action kicks off when Mrs McGillicuddy catches a train from Paddington to return home. As the train thunders through the countryside, for a moment it runs in tandem with another, and in that train she sees a man strangling a woman to death. As the train disappears, Mrs McGillicuddy realises that she has no way of finding out what happened, but nonetheless she tells the startled guard. Fortunately, when she gets home she immediately runs to tell her friend – Miss Jane Marple.

Marple believes her, but proving it will be difficult, as not only did she not see who the killer was, they also don’t know who he was strangling, and, even more confusingly, there’s no corpse either. Miss Marple, however, isn’t going to let any of that stop her. The body must be somewhere, and she soon alights on Rutherford Hall, a large house with extensive grounds that run right past the railway line. What if the killer threw the body off the train there? Alongside a new group of associates, Miss Marple sets her plans in motion, infiltrating the Crackenthorpe family home, determined to find justice.

The real beauty in this book lies in the fact that it’s all slightly backwards. Unusually, we see the murder happen very early on. But for the next hundred or so pages, we still don’t know the victim was or where her body is. This works so well, and feels such a unique twist on the usual format, that I can’t help but adore it. The suspects fall neatly from Christie’s regular pot of stock characters – the troubled businessman, the devoted daughter, the miserly patriarch, the respectable doctor, the artistic black sheep – but that seems to work all the better, as she has hung a more interesting plot over the usual framework. It also deals a lot with domestic affairs, showing how society had shifted in the fifties, with fewer people having servants or being able to run their large country houses. Christie herself was quite obsessed with this, once owning eight houses at the same time, and filling her memoir with domestic details.

The three mysteries – who the victim is, where she is, and who killed her – work well and interlock neatly, sending us all on a wild goose chase until the inevitable outcome. Alright, I’ll freely admit the resolution relies perhaps a little bit too heavily on an unlikely chance, but by that point I also found I didn’t care. The book, and Miss Marple herself, are just too clever.

I keep thinking I’m nearly at the end of re-reading all the Christie books, but I’ve still got twenty years of her career to go. If you’re new to it, or want to explore a lesser-known title, however, this is a really good place to go.

 

“The Rise And Reign Of The Mammals” by Steve Brusatte (2022)

“For the first time in years, the sun broke through the darkness.”

A couple of years back, I read Steve Brusatte’s excellent book about the age of the dinosaurs. I was delighted that he decided to carry on in time and cover the mammals.

From humble beginnings to world domination, the story of the mammals looks like your standard “rags to riches” tale, but it is anything but. Our mammalian ancestors have been around since the dawn of the dinosaurs, but rarely had the chance to get very big, especially once the reptiles had taken over, and it was only the falling of an asteroid around 66 million years ago that allowed them to begin their true rise to power.

There have been ups and downs, as the book explains, but mammals have somehow always held on, usually in a small, rodent-like form, but not always. Monotremes and marsupials were once far more common than today, but it is the placentals that managed to spread successfully around the world, leaving the others to the southern hemisphere, in particular Australia. Although the evolution of humans is discussed in the book, we are but one branch on this enormous, sprawling family tree.

Along the way we meet familiar faces such as the woolly mammoth, the sabre-toothed cat, and even the ancient Dimetrodon, which is often mistaken for a dinosaur but is more closely related to us. These were definitely the sections I found easier to comprehend, because, unlike the dinosaurs, a lot of the prehistoric mammals are less well known. They are nonetheless fascinating. The chalicotheres are favourites of mine, which were giant horse relatives that walked on their knuckles like gorillas, and then there are the South American Toxodon, a beast somewhere between a rhino, a manatee and a guinea pig. The past is a world where great birds prey on tiny horses, whales have legs, anteaters swarm through central Europe, and sloths are simply enormous.

Brusatte also spends a lot of time talking about his own discoveries, and those of his heroes, colleagues and students. There are a lot of examples of great work done by female palaeontologists too, which felt really pleasing, as the media would often suggest it’s one of those fields dominated by men. We find out about the fossils that Thomas Jefferson worked on, how we can tell what a creature ate by its teeth, and how camels and horses spread around the globe, despite both evolving in North America (but having to be reintroduced by humans later on). There are plenty of mysteries too. We don’t have the missing link between bats and non-flying mammals, for example, and we’re still not really sure what drove all the megafauna of the last glacial period of the Ice Age to extinction.

We’re never going to have a complete picture of what the past looked like, but this excellent book shines some lights on some surprising corners.

“The Old Woman With The Knife” by Gu Byeong-Mo (2013)

“So this is what it’s like on the subway on Friday nights.”

In yet another attempt to thrown my reading net wider, I land in South Korea with this novel.

Hornclaw is sixty-five years old. She lives in Seoul, with her pet dog Deadweight. She has no family, and keeps to herself. She’s also one of the country’s most skilled assassins.

Contemplating retirement (the tremor in her hand is giving her problems with her knife), she doesn’t know what she’ll do after she gives up work, so carries on for the time being. That is, until she makes a mistake, and her whole world threatens to come down around her.

Because there’s a new assassin in the team, Bullfight, and he’s taken a dislike to Hornclaw is seems determined to undermine her and kick her out of the job. With new urges and desires peppering her brain for the first time ever, Hornclaw also finds spectres from her past rushing with undue care towards her measured present, and things aren’t guaranteed to stay stable for long. All she knows for sure is that the female of the species is always deadlier than the male…

I’ve read about assassins before, and while I find the idea of them quite terrifying, they do make for interesting content. Having the assassin here be an older woman is a nice twist too, and opens up some different elements of the concept. She is a good character, and we learn things about her almost as asides, rather than in any urgent way. She remains almost as mysterious to the reader as she does those she kills.

For me, however, the book is a little too disjointed. While normally not really bothered by a lack of chronology, here it kept jarring, as we leapt back and forth in time without any clear delineation as to where we were. Little dialogue and long paragraphs means the pages sometimes felt a bit swamped, and I sometimes wasn’t entirely sure what was going on or who I was dealing with. This could easily be my own failing, or perhaps an intentional choice to represent Hornclaw’s aging mind which is now more frequently dwelling on past events. The final chapter has a beautifully played reveal too. So much detail is thrown away, and usually with great dramatic effect.

Beware the old lady with the sharpened nails.

“Quietly Hostile” by Samantha Irby (2022)

“This is not an advice book.”

I don’t know anything about Samantha Irby (or didn’t before picking up this book anyway) but since skunks are my favourite animals, and my attitude to the general public after a life in customer service can be described as “quietly hostile”, I was compelled to pick up this book anyway.

This is a collection of humorous essays by Samantha Irby, an American writer who has absolutely no filter. Be it her sexual proclivities, bowel movements or her favourite pornography, she is here to tell you about them. It’s a hard book to review due to the lack of a consistent plot, so this will be short, but it’s worth talking about because it’s a good, well-written collection, and might just make you go, “Oh, phew, it’s not just me.”

There are the adventures in trying to get a biographical sitcom off the ground with a shoestring budget, the etiquette surrounding the use of someone else’s bathroom, how to get teenagers to treat you with any sort of respect, how to panic-pack a car just before your city goes into lockdown from a global pandemic, and why liking stuff is so much better than not liking stuff.

I confess that I skipped a couple of the essays – one is about Sex and the City and another about Dave Matthews, two subjects I have no knowledge of or interest in – but others make up for it, be it the madness of having an entirely untrainable dog, or the poignancy of the death of her mother, with all its disturbing and awkward twists and turns.

A funny collection to lighten the mood of the world right now. And if nothing else, it might give you some new search terms for your next visit to a porn site.