Book Review of Fair Play by Louise Hegarty

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A Locked Room Murder mystery novel where every conclusion is reached.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This novel is set in two worlds: in the “real” present day world, a brother and sister hire a country house (in Ireland) and arrange a murder mystery holiday for themselves and their friends over the New Year, which is also the brother’s birthday. Then the brother is found dead, apparently by suicide, and the sister and the friends are left to cope with the aftermath. The sister tries to find closure where there is none and it takes her several months to accept that this is the case. (Does “closure” only exist in murder cases, in fact?)

From the morning that the brother’s body is found, however, a self-aware and self-referential murder mystery narrative unfolds, set in the same house and with equivalents to the same characters, but not in any particularly clear historical era and not even all that clearly in Ireland: the house and other nearby locations are in effect the whole world, which is often the case in that sort of story.

To begin with, this comes across as a co-authorship between Agatha Christie and Spike Milligan, but it’s actually cleverer than that and the author manages to sustain it for a whole novel. (Which is not the case with the one, to be found online, where Beatrice Potter writes “Peter Rabbit” in partnership with Sven Hassell.) Note to self: the Amazon AI won’t like that last observation one little bit, but leave it in for NetGalley.

The murder mystery really is the suicide’s sister coping with a situation where she’s never going to get any answers by trying out every possibility in her head, but it also neatly makes the point that ANY of the initial characters could turn out to be “the murderer” based on the available clues.

And that appears to be the way that Agatha Christie’s famous stage play works: the murderer rotates through the cast week by week.

It is very clever and very enjoyable.

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty is published by Picador on the 3^rd of April 2025.