Book Review of Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty

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This review is based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley of the first story only.

The life and death by scrolling of a young Irish woman.

This is set in the present day and is based on the heroine scrolling her way through life, whilst fretting about illnesses she doesn’t have, although she forgets to tell anyone about the one symptom that actually matters! But the structure is that of a basic text-only role-playing game popular on mainframes and TRS-80 type microcomputers in about 1982. The clue is that a troll keeps appearing and trying to kill her, and this is not a reference to someone posting nasty comments online. And yes, it is relevant that the young woman is Irish because this simply would not happen to anyone who was not.

It’s very funny once the reader gets their head around what’s happening. If the other stories are as good, and and assuming that there are enough of them, then the book as a whole should work quite well. The first installment was released this St Gertrude’s Day.

Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty is published by Picador (Pan Macmillan) on the 30^th of April 29026.

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.