A post-apocalyptic world. An island surrounded by deadly fog. The last of humanity struggling to find a solution. And a whodunnit with massively high stakes. I won't divulge too many details as half the fun of this book is figuring everything out as you go along!. Narrated by an all-seeing artificial intelligence, with multiple POVs and an eclectic cast of characters, it's original, clever and a bit dark. My favourite Stuart Turton book so far, can't wait for more from this author.

I don't think it's me when I am saying that I did not enjoy this book and I reallllly wanted to love it so much as I have loved all his other books so far. He tried something, but it did not work for me. It might work out for someone else though as the writing is still solid.

I thoroughly enjoyed Evelyn so I decided to give this a shot, even though the premise isn’t my usual type of thing. It was certainly intriguing, a murder mystery set amongst the end of civilisation.

There’s a large cast of characters which it took a me a while to get to grips with. I did feel that hindered me for the first half. But once I was on board, I was riveted trying to figure out what was happening in this community. A small group who have been living in their own way now seemingly have their memories disappearing and a murder on their hands - all while a deadly fog approaches. A tense premise and it delivered on that tension.

Would recommend for fans of mysteries and dystopia.

I've read the Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and enjoyed the intricate storytelling. This book was so engaging and I wanted to keep reading more and more chapters. The plot kept me guessing the whole time, I couldn't work out what would happen at the end, although I tried to piece things together.


I received this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I entered this book without having really read much science fiction as it’s not my usual genre at all .

I don’t do science fiction but this was good :) review left on Goodreads ! Revolves around an island and its inhabitants Co inhabiting with 3 scientists. One of the islanders is murdered and they have to solve the murder them selves .

However they only have 92 hours to solve it the threat of some fog that will drop and destroy them .

I surprisingly enjoyed it , and for those that enjoy this genre it’s perfect .

Thank you @bloomsbury publishing and netgalley for the opportunity to read it .

I LOVED THIS BOOK!

I had not read anything by this author before so did not have any expectations but I loved this book. The story is a great twist on the whodunnit genre, with so many twists and turns.

The story is being told through Abi, who is an AI who supports all the villagers trapped on the island and through ABI you get perspectives from different characters across the island giving you insights and understanding that other characters don't have. I really enjoyed the different view points we were getting bit still always through the character of Abi with their own observations.

This is such a creative story with really well thought out and engaging characters. I would definitely recommend and I'm looking forward to reading more by Stuart Turton.

A fog surrounds the whole world killing everything it touches except for one island and half a mile of ocean surrounding it. On this island live three scientists and 122 villagers. They are working together to make their tiny remaining patch of the world a better place. All is going well until one of the scientists is found murdered. Everyone is a suspect and one person isn’t waiting for the truth to come out before meting out justice. This mystery needs solving fast before more people are killed.

What a joy to have a third book from Stuart Turton. Although this has the dystopian AI futuristic fantasy theme, it still feels much more like his original Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle with the plot twists that keep you guessing right up to the last pages. I just loved reading this and delighted in the author’s exceptional writing skills. I wasn’t so keen on his Devil and the Dark Water and wondered if Evelyn was his best book. This one has convinced me that he really does have more great stories to tell and I can’t wait to read them.

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.

Right from the first page, the reader has questions and the gradual reveal of these and the introduction of more are intriguing and keep you turning the pages. As well as wanting to know more about the inhabitants and society of the group, there is the impending countdown to the destruction of humanity by an encroaching killer black fog and the investigation of a murder, which promises to halt the fog if the murderer is brought to justice.
You definitely need to just go along with the page-turning ride on this crime, thriller dystopian science-fiction mash-up. The world-building is very good and the characters, although briefly sketched, work well. I was initially doubtful about the omni-present voice in people's heads - is this the writer or an omnipotent being - but as the story progresses, I got used to it and the gradual reveal fits in with all the rest of the carefully calculated plotting and set up.
Nothing is as it seems and the climax may pull the rug from under you or irk your sense of trust with the writer after setting up such a ratcheted narrative. Regardless, the read is a thrilling and enjoyable one, creating many memorable images in my mind's eye.

There’s so much to love here, especially the narrator and I am a huge fan of Turton.

The issues I had with this book is the vast amount of characters, I was unable to feel attached to any of them because I was just trying to keep up.

A must read for fans of station eleven.

Welcome to my book review of The Last Murder at the End of the World. First of all a huge thank you to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for the eARC of this novel.

This is the new novel by Stuart Turton, who wrote one of my favourite thrillers The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I am always intrigued when he brings out something new, so jumped at the chance to read an early copy of this one!

Turton’s novels always offer something slightly different from your regular thriller, and this one is no different. A run of the mill murder mystery with a twist, the last of humanity are the suspects, and there’s 92 hours before the world ends for all of them.

This novel is packed full of twists and turns, your assumptions about the book are constantly undermined and changed, which I quite enjoyed. You also discover more about the situation these characters are living in, and how they came to be the only survivors left on earth.

The only element of this novel which didn’t quite hit were the characters themselves. None of them are likeable, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I just couldn’t connect or relate to any of them. As a result I read the book feeling quite detached from the action. I don’t really enjoy reading this way, it definitely affects the way I rate a novel.

Despite my lack of connection to the characters, I liked this novel, its a fresh and interesting thriller, which will definitely appeal to fans of Station Eleven!

The World has ended. Everybody is dead, except for a small village on a remote island protected by a barrier. But when a beloved member of the village - one of only three scientists - is found murdered, the barrier starts to fail. And the villagers are left with only days to solve the crime before they die like the rest of the world...

I thought the world building in this book was so clever. I desperately need a prequel about the actual ending of the world! In the meantime though, I was completely gripped by this fascinating science fiction murder mystery and it's thoroughly satisfying twists.

I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

For some reason unbeknownst to me I could not get into this book. I tried and tried but unfortunately it’s just overly complicated, has too many characters and not ticking my boxes,

Turton writes mysteries like no-one else. They twist and turn unpredictably and with such joyous love for the history of mystery novels, that it’s impossible not to get swept along with the terrific plot.

Stuart Turton has a gift for taking the tried-and-tested formula of the 'whodunnit' and elevating it into something even more complex and mind-boggling. He's done history and time travel and now here's a post-apocalyptic mystery. The story is set on an island surrounded by a thick fog full of killer insects, held back by a barrier. The island has only 122 inhabitants, all that remains of humanity after the insects wiped out everyone else. The people are led by three capricious 'elders', all scientists who survived the original apocalypse. Their lives are highly regimented although not unhappy, and despite the obvious strangeness that will strike the reader very quickly, they are remarkably incurious about their circumstances. The exception is Emory, an unusually observant woman who can't stop herself asking difficult questions, even though it alienates her from her peers.

The action really kicks off when one of the elders is found dead - apparently murdered by someone who botched the cover-up. To make matters worse, the barrier that held back the deadly fog has been deactivated by a dead-man's switch, and can only be reactivated by solving the crime and executing the person responsible. Naturally, the task falls to Emory, who has just a few days to work out who did it before the last of the human race is wiped out. As if that weren't pressure enough, her task is made harder by all the gaps in her knowledge about the truth behind the situation on the island.

The narrator is an artificial intelligence, known as Abi, who is able to control the villagers (but not the elders) and hear everybody's thoughts. This is a clever technique as it allows a omnipotent first-person narration, which in turn allows the reader to wonder about the reliability of the narrator whilst still getting every viewpoint. It is well written and flows well and although there is lots of information to take in about the set-up of this world, it never felt like hard work. The plot is compelling and linear and there are twists aplenty, as you'd expect.

I didn't feel a strong emotional investment in the characters, although many of them are likeable enough. There were a couple of aspects of Emory's behaviour towards the end that really annoyed me and that didn't ring true to her characterisation earlier in the book. But other than that it is a well written and clever murder mystery that is a bit different. A must-read for fans of murder mysteries, and for those that dabble in the genre only occasionally, if you want a highbrow puzzler, this a great choice.

Stuart Turton's "The Last Murder at the End of the World" is a riveting mystery that skillfully melds the genres of science fiction, suspense, and classic whodunit within the backdrop of an apocalyptic world. Set on an isolated island, Turton introduces a compelling cast of characters navigating a complex two-tier society, each harbouring their own motives and secrets.
Following the murder of one of the scientists, the protagonist, Emory (a female Columbo), whose life appears to have been leading to this moment, is tasked with solving the crime before the island is engulfed by a fog that has already killed everyone else on the planet.
Turton interweaves multiple timelines and perspectives, keeping readers in suspense until the final pages. Just when you believe you have deciphered the intricacies of the mystery, Turton introduces another twist that skillfully challenges and reshapes your understanding of the unfolding events.

Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC!

I absolutely loved Turton's debut, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, however his follow up, The Devil and the Dark Water, was not for me and so I was hoping that this latest novel would be as enjoyable for me as his first. But unfortunately I could not get into this. I found it too hard to follow and subsequently felt like I was slugging through it and felt no desire to pick it back up each time I would put it down.

Well ... I'm not quite sure if this book is what I was expecting or not. It's fair to say that it is vastly different from The Devil and the Dark Water but I have to confess to not having read Seven Deaths so I can't comment in relation to that one. Although, saying that, it is not all that different in that Stuart Turton has served up a murder mystery so intriguing, with characters so diverse, and often secretive, that it is hard not to mistrust them all in turn, all in a setting so isolated that it serves as a grand scale ticking clock turned locked room mystery. One is historical, the other set in a very dystopian future, and Arent Hayes of Dark Water fame, and End of the World's hero, Emory, are absolutely chalk and cheese. But what they are faced with is a very finite amount of time in which to solve a very complex puzzle, in Emory's case with her life, and the lives of those she loves, very much on the line.

There is a kind if sci-fi vibe to this very high concept thriller. Emory, her family and her friends, live on the last inhabited island on earth, the rest of the world having been destroyed by a dark fog which carries a mysterious plague which devastated populations and species of all kinds. A small number of people managed to escape to the small Greek island, a former naval base, where scientists had been able to find a way to keep the danger of the fog at bay. Everything in the island seems idyllic, everyone living in perfect harmony. There are conditions, and every Islander must play their part in keeping the community safe and nourished, but they are all too happy to do that for the sake of their friends and family. Almost too good to be true, right?

Abso-fluffing-lutely. And from the very start of the book we get the feeling that something is afoot, that this perfect, if limited, existence is soon going to be under threat. I like the way in which the author slowly introduces all the key players to the reader, allowing them to establish who, if not immediately what, they are. Because, as we learn all too soon, nothing on this island is quite what it seems. Yes - they are kept safe from the fog, but at what cost. There are many secrets being kept, many half truths being told, and many unexplained happenings on a nightly basis which just add to the puzzling nature of this story. It kept me intrigued, wondering why inexplicable occurrences happened and why nobody every asked why. Nobody other than Emory.

I liked Emory. She is the one person on the island, other than the Elders, which a natural, insatiable, curiosity. It makes her almost an outcast amongst the peers, but all the more interesting to me as a reader. She is the island's Jane Marple in a community full of people who are just happy to go with the flow. When one of the Elders is murdered, it is Emory who is tasked with finding out the who and why of it, a task she is naturally suited to. She is tenacious, both brave and scared all at once. She is driven by a thirst for knowledge and a need for understanding, all of which masks a keen personal loss. Of all the characters we meet, she is the only one I felt I truly trusted, although that trust was pushed to the limits at times too.

The mystery, the murder of Elder Niema, adds a real feeling of jeopardy to the novel. It becomes a catalyst for the urgency that follows, that ticking clock situation that starts to drive and increase the pacing of the book. It is critical that Emory solves the murder in order to prevent the entire island being consumed by the flog, but at what cost. Efforts are hampered, the author using an interesting technique to ensure that witness testimony is sketchy, at best, entirely missing in most cases. The potential cost of recall is high, and the consequences quite sobering. But the more we learn, the more evident it is that nothing in this book should be taken at face value. There are questions that arise early in the book that are eventually answered in an eye-opening way, showing how easy it is to make assumptions, and that ignorance can easily distort the truth.

This is not your typical murder mystery, and yet, at its heart, it really is. You have your victim, your amatuer detective, and your finite list of suspects, but with a whole host of motives for murder that, unfortunately, none of them can actually recall. With misdirection rife, and the island itself containing more secrets than answers, it's a book that really drew me in and had me pondering with each new revelation. The second half of the book is definitely faster paced, but that slow build is actually vital to allow you to take it all in. It's maybe a little outside of my usual genre read, but one I really enjoyed and can heartily recommend to enjoy a true high concept thriller.

Absolutely fascinating dystopian world where a deadly fog has engulfed the earth, leaving only one tiny haven of civilisation alive. It’s on this island that our story takes place, following three scientists and the villagers who run the island - the descendants of the survivors of the fog. The three scientists are ageless, and they have worked tirelessly for decades and decades to find a way to destroy the fog. Meanwhile the villagers, who always die on the 60the birthdays, are the cogs that keep the village alive.

Then one scientist is found dead, and suddenly a string of events are taking place. In just 92 hours, the fog will reach the island and kill everyone exposed to it. Our protagonist, the enigmatic Emory, is charged with finding out who the murderer is, and only with that information can they even hope to survive what is coming.

I really enjoyed this novel! I’m so glad I had the chance to read it now, and I absolutely raced through it, intrigued by how everything would come together. I liked that through Emory, we discovered tidbits of information about the island, and shocking secrets are revealed gradually through the plot. I loved learning about this new world, and it was interesting to follow from all the perspectives - that of the three scientists, some from the villagers… it all came together so seamlessly. The plot was tense and the murder mystery was not really the main part of it. The mysteries of the island were so intricate and I definitely enjoyed learning about that more than in solving the murder with Emory. Emory and her family were great characters to follow - she’s charismatic and charming even where the villagers think the opposite!

A definite must-read, especially if you enjoyed Turton’s previous novels! ☺️

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton
Following the death of almost all the inhabitants of earth a few scientists and some simple villagers remain on an isolated island. They are protected from the deadly fog which has caused the end of civilisation but the death of one of the scientists triggers the release of a dead man’s switch and Emory, a villager, has to solve her murder in order to stop the deadly fog.
Emory has an fascination for the novels of Agatha Christie and the methods of Sherlock Holmes and therefore although this is science fiction it is also a suspense filled murder mystery. It is an interesting blend of the two genres and this works very well.
Emory is an interesting character who is unafraid to challenge the scientists who rule over her island. She alone is prepared to question their acts and to search relentlessly for the truth however difficult that truth may be. Her daughter, Clara, also rises to the challenges placed before her.
Narrating the story is an omnipresent artificial intelligence created by the scientists called Abi and she provides an interesting perspective on the story. It was an extremely interesting story with an unexpected ending and it was very well written indeed. It demonstrates the author’s skill and ability to surprise the reader. The novel is very different from Stuart Turton’s last novels both of which I loved.
Many thanks to the author, the publishers and Net Galley for the opportunity to read the book in return for an honest review.