The Last Murder at the End of the World - Stuart Turton

Having previously read Turton's fascinating puzzle mystery The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, I was quite used to the idea that he proposes in his latest novel, another little enclosed world that is shrouded in mystery with no apparent means of escape other than death, or deaths in the case of Evelyn Hardcastle. Here in The Last Murder at the End of the World however things seem even more detached from any familiar real world situation, the small community here on an island apparently the only people left alive on the planet. And judging by the prologue, there is not even long left for humanity on the planet, unless Neima can pull off a daring scheme. Judging from the title however, someone is going to be murdered before then.

There are only 93 hours left before the human race becomes extinct. The remaining population of 122 people are on an island, by chance the only place on earth that has escaped from a deadly fog that kills any living thing it touches. Ninety years ago fog appeared from huge sinkholes in the earth, swallowing cities, swarms of insects destroying any living creature, and within a year it has covered the earth. All except the Greek island that housed the Blackheath Institute research laboratory. Neima, the chief researcher there put out the word that people could come there for safety. Now however even the underground laboratory where they worked is sealed off to prevent the fog from drifting up.

Considering the fate of the world, there is evidently a lack of basic essentials that we have become accustomed to, but research groups of volunteers have been set up to explore the island and try to revive old technology. There are other unusual aspects to this society. For a start it's run by three elders: Thea, Neima and Hephaestus who are well over a hundred years old, who force the rest of the population to live by some strange rules, instilling curfews, ensuring that everyone else accepts death at the age of 60 and replacing them with a new child to ensure a controlled population for the limited resources of the island. Only Emory questions the way the island is run and is determined to find answers to questions that no one else seems willing to ask about the telling signs that there is something else going on that they are not being told about.

As if this is not sinister enough, the narrator Abi is 173 years old and is able to read the minds of everyone on the island and can thereby accurately predict the future and the upcoming disaster. Who Abi is is revealed in intriguing drops of information, but as is usual with Turton, the more information you get the more puzzling things get. In a future world which clearly had fabulous technology, memory gems and long-life expectancy, but where almost everything has now been lost, there are many puzzles to be resolved. Turton has a great way of dropping little strange observations in, leading you to suspect that there is some kind of grand conspiracy being played out.

Living up to the title then, the second half of the book becomes a detective murder mystery but being Turton and in a futuristic SF setting where everyone's memories have been deleted, it's far from a conventional thriller. Ultimately The Last Murder at the End of the World is more than just a puzzle, a mystery, the science fiction element as it should being a means to consider human behaviour and inhuman behaviour and it raises questions over how we are supposed to face up to an uncertain future. You can't fault the ideas behind the story or Turton's handling of the material, dropping intriguing clues, presenting tense situations where life and death and a horrible fate are only hours away, and where a SF murder investigation whodunit has a number of original twists. I can't really fault the range of characters developed either, but somehow it all still feels a little too detached and possibly over-complicated to wholeheartedly win you over.

Reading notes: The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton is published by Bloomsbury Publishing, Raven Books on the 28th March 2024. My thanks to the published and NetGalley for the advance proof for review.