By Michael Grossberg and Charlie Morrison
A genre-smashing, bestselling and award-winning novelist, Stuart Turton is widely hailed for his speculative tales of mystery, imagination and human complexity.
The Last Murder at the End of the World, one of 11 Prometheus Best Novel nominees from 2024 and the first work by Turton recognized by our awards, offers the satisfactions of several types of works in one strange but compelling hybrid.
It’s an ingenious murder mystery, an imaginative work of science fiction/fantasy, a suspenseful story of survival, a cautionary dystopian tale, a haunting memory piece and a gripping drama.
INTRICATE PLOTTING IN A LOCKED-ROOM MYSTERY
Intricately plotted with quite a few twists that shouldn’t be revealed, The Last Murder is impressive first of all as a fantastical variant of a “locked-room” mystery, set on an isolated island in a post-apocalyptic future.
Only 125 refugees live on the island, surrounded for 90 years by a carnivorous fog and guided by a AI entity of uncertain programming and motives. When the murder of the village matriarch threatens everyone on the island by triggering a countdown to the automatic opening of the island’s barriers to the fog, the desperate inhabitants must solve an unfolding series of mysteries about the murder and the island to safeguard their future.
Although the propulsive plot and interesting variety of vivid characters makes Turton’s novel a relatively fast and smooth read, the 432-page story achieves a rare philosophical heft and depth.
Among its libertarian and anti-authoritarian themes, The Last Murder wrestles with the tensions that can arise between the individual versus collective good. The story also explores the proper scope of self-preservation and capital punishment while ultimately underscoring a subtle but vital lesson: Questioning authority, rather than blindly bowing to the status quo, is often the only way to find truth.
In her positive review in Reason, the leading libertarian magazine, editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu Ward noted that the book accomplishes a great deal despite its “deceptively light and smooth” surfaces. Woven throughout the cautionary tale but only fully revealed by its end is “a century of noble lies” and a “philosophical exploration of the perfectibility of man and the dangers of absolute power.”
INVESTIGATING A SERIES OF MYSTERIES
Emory, one of the villagers, is the protagonist solving the murder mystery. Yet, she quickly discovers that the murder is merely one mystery among others.
Ultimately, many mysteries about this world and this island are revealed throughout the story. While Emory is trying to investigate the murder, the novel’s readers are trying just as hard to understand this strange world – a quest that increasingly engages Emory as she finds out more.
One mystery that deepens is why she’s been chosen, among the 122 villagers and three elders, to investigate the murder. Could that be because she alone seems to have the desire to question the wider world around her?
If so, that poses another mystery: Why doesn’t anyone else care about that, and the murder, as much as she does?
While Emory naturally questions everything, the other villagers defer to the elders about everything. They appear to live their lives obediently doing their assigned tasks, content to socialize with other villages after the day’s work is done and then retire to restful sleep.
Above all, and strangely, they don’t question authority – or anything else.
But not Emory, who has trouble fitting into her small society. She alone notices inconsistencies in her understanding of the world, and logs them in notebooks she hides under her bed. Although isolated from her community, that makes Emory the perfect person to investigate the murder.
AN INTRIGUING CASE OF AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
Meanwhile, Abi, the island’s resident “AI,” appears as a voice in the heads of all the villagers. Is Abi fully conscious or merely a computer program installed to accomplish certain tasks and provide responses to the villagers? Who created the island’s apparent “AI” and why?
More mysteries emerge, but one bit of data quickly becomes clear: Abi doesn’t have to be truthful. And since Abi narrates the story, that allows Turton’s novel to benefit from the additional uncertainties and suspense inherent in exploring what might be dubbed The Strange Case of the Unreliable Narrator.
Fans of the Emmy-winning TV series Lost, meanwhile, will enjoy Turton’s intricate wheels-within-wheels plotting and be both challenged and entertained by the varied and progressive questions that go to the root of his high-concept world-building.
Like Lost, The Last Murder introduces fresh questions and mysteries throughout, even as Turton begins to answer some earlier questions that arise as the characters explore the island further and attempt to solve the murder mystery.
TIMELESS QUESTIONS ABOUT ETHICS AND POWER
So many mysteries deepen into more mysteries that one begins to yearn to have at least some answered, well before story’s end. Even so, at least one major and illuminating twist is well worth waiting for.
Yet, in The Last Murder, Turton also raises timeless, important and thought-provoking questions that will linger about humanity, ethics, survival, our use and abuse of power and to what extent, if any, good intentions justify the use of power.
From a libertarian perspective, readers can appreciate the story’s ethical distinctions. Although the basic right to use force for legitimate self-defense and the defense of others is affirmed, the temptation to kill power-abusing rulers is ultimately rejected or condemned – even when the average reader might well have viewed killing in specific circumstances as morally justified.
A final plot development can’t be revealed without undermining the reader’s enjoyment of the unfolding levels of mystery and surprise. Suffice to say that this twist, truly admirable in its ethical motivation, makes this novel better fit the Prometheus Awards and their libertarian ideals. Even better, the final reveal may spark reconsideration of some of our earlier assumptions about some characters and their murky motivations.
What makes this novel such a profound cautionary tale, and one still worth pondering even afterwards, is its persuasive and fresh reminder of how so many ambitious utopian plans so often end disastrously – in fiction and in actual history.
WHAT ABOUT THAT CARNIVOROUS FOG?
Whether Turton’s ultimate revelations and answers fully fit the narrower genre confines of science fiction or also begin to embrace elements of fantasy or merely the unknowable will pose a further issue to unravel for some traditional-minded genre fans.
Readers must be patient with the world-building, key aspects of which either aren’t clarified until near the end or worse, not fully explained at all. (For instance, what about the source and nature of that “carnivorous fog,” which contains ravenous glowing insects that kill anyone who enters the fog. What science might conceivably explain that? Turton doesn’t bother offering even a hint of an explanation.)
Turton also doesn’t choose to make clear the cause of the worldwide disaster, which some readers may really wish to have explained. Yet, that’s probably not necessary for this well-plotted story to work within his overall world-building – and another indication that the author wasn’t aiming to write anything like “hard” science fiction, but rather to devise and maintain a tight focus on a truly closed-system mystery.
AN ENTERTAINING HYBRID OF GENRES
Turton’s unusual hybrid of mystery, dystopia and the fantastical may not appeal to every taste. At times, despite his vivid and wide-ranging imagination and deft blending of genres, Turton comes across as initially and primarily a mystery writer who enjoys playing with SF, fantasy and dystopian tropes for the larger purpose of creating an especially inventive and distinctive mystery.
One might add that the futuristic landscape and gizmos simply provide SF dressing and decorative staging for the particular story that Turton wants to tell.
Meanwhile, the landscape, settings and some props aren’t always described realistically. Several inconsistencies in the positioning of the wall of fog versus the island’s volcano on the east or west may sound like minor quibbles. Yet, accuracy is important to build plausibility and an objective sense of reality, especially when so much else in the story is strange.
Turton, a British writer previously acclaimed for his first two bestselling novels, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water, does manage to weave several genres together with satisfying results in The Last Murder at the End of the World.
Hopefully, this won’t be the last Turton novel eligible for nomination for the Prometheus Award, or end his fascinating forays beyond mainstream mystery into the broader realms of fantastical fiction.
* Read the Prometheus Blog reviews of other current Best Novel nominees, including Lionel Shriver’s Mania, Danny King’s Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky and Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale.
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