To The Last Page

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 fo...

On the one hand, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a classic English country manor murder-mystery, but there’s a clue in the title that there’s perhaps a little more than this being a little different from the usual Agatha Christie pastiche. In as far as the murder-mystery question of who killed Evelyn Hardcastle at Blackheath manor, the usual suspects that can be found in a select group of notable society figures each with dark secrets are all in place. Explaining how Evelyn Hardcastle dies seven times however is a little more complicated. The fact that everything is not entirely what it seems is evident in the way that the reader is rather jarringly and unsettlingly thrown straight into a troubling and intriguing situation. Sebastian Bell finds himself inexplicably in the middle of the woods, screaming the name of a woman who appears to be being pursued by an attacker. He doesn’t know how he got there, and for a while can’t even remember his own name. It’s a bit like being ha...