This was a fascinating study of grief and how we cope with it! I really felt for Abigail, especially in the “reality” chapters.
At first, I loved the device of investigating Ben’s death like a murder mystery, but in the last quarter of the book, it began to wear on me. Louise Hegarty is clearly a connoisseur of the genre, but towards the end I wanted more of the reality and less of the detective novel chapters.
Still, a very talented debut and a very touching read!

Abigail is hosting a birthday party for her brother, Benjamin & has invited his circle of close friends. She arrives at the Airbnb to set up the food & drink & also hide the clues for the period murder mystery game they'll be playing later. The party passes without a hitch but the next morning, Benjamin fails to appear for breakfast. His bedroom door is locked & he isn't answering their knocks so they eventually break the door open but Benjamin is dead.

The story then splits into two, one following the aftermath in the present & the second has the friends appear in a real-life murder mystery. A famous detective arrives to investigate the death & the house suddenly has staff including a butler, a gardener and a housekeeper. This is a golden-age locked-room mystery & everyone is a suspect.

This started off quite well & I was looking forward to the offbeat angle of the mystery. There were aspects I liked: the knowing metaphorical 'wink' to the audience by the detective, the nods to the authors (including Conan Doyle & Agatha Christie) of some of the greatest detectives ever written, & the dual narrative, but overall it just didn't work. The main issue for me is that the ending just didn't make sense - I'm not sure if it was due to being an ARC & there was some text missing or not, but it just finished abruptly. I'm still not entirely sure who the actual killer was supposed to be in the end. 3.25 stars (rounded down) as I did enjoy most of it but the ending let it down.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Pan Macmillan/Picador, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Louise Hegarty is a new to me author so I was interested to see if her writing would be to my taste, but unfortunately after reading this I discovered it wasn't.
First off, this book started off strongly and I enjoyed the first part. I liked how all our characters were brought together for a murder mystery evening and I was having a good time. But that was when it ended.
Part 2 seemed to take a turn in the plot and the writing and I wasn't a fan. I found the switch to be jarring and straight away I fell out with the book.
I maybe in the minority here, but it felt so muddled to me. It felt like it was trying to be meta style Agatha Christie and I hated it.
Then it would add in all these bits of breaking the fourth wall, it read like it was the 1920's but it actually isn't and I just ended up feeling so uninterested.
All the characters felt very 2D and all lacked any backstory. I was never invested in the plot or the mystery that was going on.
I'm not sure what the author was trying to achieve with this book, but it went completely over my head. The whole story felt flat and surface level with no depth to the plot or characters.
This was a unique story but it just didn't work for me.

I’m sorry but this wasn’t for me! I found it quite confusing, it started off well in an Air BNB holiday home but then it seemed as though Abigail was living there. Then suddenly servants arrived who had been with Abigail and Benjamin’s family for years. There were also a good amount of repetition which I did skip over. I got that there were shades of Sherlock Holmes and characters from Agatha Christie’s books. I also realised the significance of the last trip down memory lane. I don’t like giving a negative review, however, there were other reviewers who really enjoyed this book. I received a copy and have voluntarily reviewed it. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Fair Play by Louie Hegarty is a novel that left me wondering if I missed something. I noticed one of two things as I was going along but by the end I had probably as many questions as answers. It could be that I just didn't pay close enough attention; hopefully there will be more enlightenment and I can appreciate this fully.

This debut novel from Irish author Louise Hegarty needs filing under “Quirky”. It’s a whodunnit which turns itself inside out, both featuring and subverting the tropes of a locked room mystery. “Quirky” is a bit of a risk – if it pays off then you can end up with something like Janice Hallet’s “The Appeal” (2021) which made her name and with its development of a crime plot wholly through text messages, e-mails and Post-It Notes felt totally original and was a Top 5 book for me in 2021. Get it wrong, however, and it can end up with a sense of style over substance.
I approached this with an open mind, sensing something fresh, but soon had the niggling feeling that the author’s approach to this novel had probably been done countless times before. Tom Stoppard’s play “The Real Inspector Hound” premiered back in 1968 kept slipping into my subconscious.
It all starts straightforwardly. An Air BnB is rented for a joint New Year’s/Birthday party with the change of year being seen in by the guests playing a murder mystery game, adapting the stereotypical guises of a 1920’s Jazz-Age country house set-up. By the next morning a real death has occurred and the second part of the novel features a mash-up between the characters coping with the events with grief as a central theme and 1920s counterparts of the same characters as part of a locked room mystery novel. There is considerable humour here in the characters recognising the artifice, referring to things happening in chapters and seeing themselves as part of a successful Golden Age Crime franchise. Within the contemporary sections the characters become more fully realised than they would have done within the format of the traditional mystery novel.
Tropes and crime fiction cliches appear and are subverted and disappear. There’s multiple solutions and the contemporary and classic elements often morph into one another. There were sections when I was muttering under my breath “don’t do that, don’t do that” in a belated plea to the author who went on and did it anyway.
A third section raises more questions than it answers with a distinct change of tone but maintaining the reserved sense of politeness which permeates the first section but ultimately left me a tad bewildered.
I think there is a danger, as far as I am concerned, if too much is played around with then the reader does not know where they are supposed to fit into the proceedings and they can stop caring. I got the crime references, enjoyed both the humour and the emotional heft of sudden death and characterisation but at times it felt like an in-joke that I was being excluded from.
But this writer can write and that kept me going throughout and I can say I enjoyed it but the different elements did not pull together in the way I hoped and the playful freshness that I was anticipating didn’t lead to anything that special and ultimately I was left with a sense of having experienced a really promising writer whose idea was not fully realised on this occasion.
“Fair Play” was published by Picador on 4th April 2025. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

This is definitely one of those books that makes you think, which is never a bad thing. Whilst reading the story it is perhaps easy to get a bit and lost and confused in some of the story and narratives. However, when you sit back and reflect upon the book as a whole it is easier to appreciate. For me the book didn’t flow quite as well as I would like as there wasn’t really an opportunity to get to know the characters but it does make you think about grief and how everyone deals with it and processes it differently.

This is a novel that has got very mixed reviews and I can see why. I’m not really sure what I have read. Its a locked room mystery, very reminiscent of Agatha Christie . It starts with an invite to Benjamin's murder mystery themed birthday party / New Years Eve party where there are a select number of guests including this sister Abigail who is the host. Benjamin is found dead and in comes detective Auguste Bell and his sidekick Sacker .Together they try to solve the mystery by interviewing the guests. However in Part 2 , I wasn’t sure what was going on and was left feeling confused. It’s an original take on this kind of crime story and didn’t end the way I thought it would .. I think it would make a good book club read and spark a good discussion.

I love puzzles and a locked room mystery so this was a exciting read for me. It different timelines was very interesting and made it more exciting for me.

Abigail and Benjamin always have a New Year's Eve murder mystery party combined with a birthday party for him. Thye hire out an Airbnb and several of their friends come. This year there is a new person, Barbara, who works with Benjamin..
It's all fun and games until Benjamin fails to wake up in the morning. At this point the story splits into two timelines. The one that you assume is real-time where a grieving Abigail has to continue her life whilst grieving her brother's suicide and one that appears to be in the 1930s with a Detective called Auguste Bell who turns up to find out who murdered Benjamin. The story switches between the two eras and in some cases rewrites itself, so can be a bit confusing in parts.
A nice little read.

Fair Play is a book about the unexpected and unexplained death of Benjamin in an Irish country mansion on the night of his New Year's birthday party organised by his sister Abigail. Abigail has themed the birthday party as a 1920's murder mystery party and as tragedy strikes, reality and fiction start to collide as Abigail uses the tropes of Golden Age detective fiction to work through her brother's death.

I liked what the author was trying to do here plating with the rules, but I think I would have enjoyed a plain Golden Age detective story better.

Abigail and her brother Benjamin have always been close and especially so since the loss of both their parents . To celebrate his birthday, which falls on New Year’s Day, Abigail hires a grand old house and gathers their friends together for a murder mystery party, which has become one of their traditions. As the night goes on, they drink too much champagne and play games. But in the morning as everyone gathers for breakfast, they realise Benjamin is dead.

The story then changes into what seems to be a locked room murder mystery, as Abigail is convinced that the local police and the doctor, who say this was a suicide, are wrong and she hires a detective to solve the case. We follow the detective’s reasoning (reads very much like an Agatha Christie in those parts) as he tries to find the murderer. The story is then further interspersed with present day descriptions of Abigail’s life, following her brother’s death, as she grieves for Benjamin and tries to work out how to go on and live without him.

In all honesty, the book was not what I expected and I was a little confused when I finished it but (I think I am right in this) on reflection I have realised that it is an exploration of grief, especially following such a harrowing death as death by suicide. Abigail revisits the day of, the days and weeks before Benjamin’s death to try and make sense of it but this is done in a quirky way of presenting this exploration as a locked room murder mystery. I did enjoy it each section in its own right and it was a quick and easy read and due to the slight confusion it caused me, it has certainly made me think!

would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for letting me read this book

a parody of an hercule preriot book and i am not sure about it at all.....

a murder mystery on new years day, brother and sister hold their annual party only the brother doesnt wake up the morning of new years day.... hes been murdered and the murderer is someone that is in the house ... a friend or a relative

its an easy read though whether you agree with the author on who the murderer is depends on whether your own deductive skills think otherwise....

its definitely in the weird category

This was a fun read but really just okay. It felt as though we didn't get very clearly defined characters or a real sense of the relationships between characters. Had the characters arrived to the house gradually at the beginning it would have made the ensuing plot much more compelling as I wouldn't have spent anywhere near the concerning amount of time I did going 'who is that again?' every time a name was dropped. I also wasn't a fan of the present (?) tense narration. It felt like a lot of the things that could've been really interesting had they been done intentionally were just accidents of the author, which was a pity.

What an intriguing book. I loved the way it plays with genre and form to explore grief and loss and the final section was an incredibly moving portrait to round everything off. (Spoilers) It starts out as a gentle and straightforward account of a group of friends and family getting together for a murder mystery weekend to celebrate a birthday. Then when the birthday boy Benjamin is found dead in his room it becomes slightly surreal and turns into a pastiche of a country house murder mystery, interspersed with real quotes about the rules of writing in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Gradually, as more realistic scenes from the life of Benjamin's sister Abigail appear, you realise that the detective elements are her attempts to impose order and meaning on the apparently senseless loss of her brother. Incredibly clever, it had a whiff of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine About It. I enjoyed it but I wonder if it will fall slightly between two stools - the pastiche element reading a bit too cosy crime for literary fiction readers and the literary/psychological aspect being a bit confusing for people who love cosy crime. I hope not because it's a really clever and very affecting book. I'd give it a 3.5 but rounded it up to 4. Will review online later this week when it has launched.

A group of friend gather at an Airbnb on New Year's Eve. It's Benjamin's birthday, and his sister Abigail is throwing him a jazz-age murder mystery themed party. As the night plays out, champagne is drunk, hor d'oeuvres consumed, and relationships forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses the wrong person; someone else's heart is broken. In the morning all of them wake-up - except Benjamin. As Abigail attempts to wrap her mind around her brother's death, an eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin's killer. In this mansion, suddenly complete with a butler, gardener, and housekeeper, everyone is a suspect, and nothing is quite as it seems.

This well-written murder mystery party was supposed to celebrate Abigail's brother's birthday on New Year's Eve. But by New Year's day, Benjamin is dead. Abigail struggles to cope with her brother's death. The story is told in three parts.

The characters are misleading, we get an eccentric detective and their partner, and a locked-room mystery that will hold your attention throughout.

Published 3rd April 2025

I would like to thank #NetGalley #PanMcmillan #Picador and the aithor #LouiseHegerty for my ARC of#FairPlay in exchange for an honest review/

With thanks to Netgalley, Pan Macmillan and Picador for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Like a lot of reviewers, it seems, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. It starts off as a fun romp featuring a group of friends, with all the intrigues and dynamics that brings, before spinning off into a meta-textual murder mystery and a meditation on grief - possibly both simultaneously.

I *think* I liked it a lot. It's a brisk, entertaining read, but there's also a lot more behind it. Whether I'm fully getting everything behind it, I'm not entirely sure - and there's a part of me that's not always convinced that there's as much there to get as the book thinks there is. But I'm inclined to come down on the positive side and give this the benefit of the doubt.

I think this would be an excellent choice for book groups. There's lots to discuss, from dissecting whodunnit, to exploring the intertextuality of the locked-room mystery and the archetypes (implicitly and explicitly) drawn upon, to debating really what the book is trying to say.

I was invited to read Fair Play via Netgalley and I jumped at the chance. I love a puzzle in a novel, and this one promised that and more. Unfortunately, Fair Play didn’t quite work out for me, although it does some things very well.

The novel starts with Abigail hiring an Airbnb to host a New Year’s birthday bash for her brother, Benjamin, with a few close friends invited. There’s a tradition of running a murder mystery party which Abigail devises and which gets very competitive in the group. The next morning, they awaken to find Benjamin’s bedroom door locked. With growing concern, they break the door down to find Benjamin dead in his bed. It’s an explosive start which gives the reader an introduction to the characters, and we quickly find out who gets along (and who doesn’t!) as well as those with more amorous connections, either past, present, or desired.

We see the aftermath of that shocking discovery as Benjamin’s sister and friends try to reconcile themselves with his death. This is particularly difficult for Abigail who struggles to return to work after a period of bereavement and who finds it understandably hard to adjust. Hegarty illustrates Abigail’s grief very well. We see the vultures desperate for gossip, particularly given the unusual circumstances, and those who use Abigail’s experiences as an opportunity to talk about their own. There are also those who don’t know what to say, and so try to ignore it or who expect Abigail to just move on and to be the same person that she was before. Abigail’s reactions to all this are largely realistic, and we see her good days and bad days, as well as the inner turmoil as she tries to do what needs doing. It does descend into farce at one point, but for the most part is well done.

There is also a second narrative running in parallel to the aftermath of the party which takes the form of a golden age mystery led by detective Auguste Bell. The focus of this story within a story is the same – what happened to Benjamin and why – but casts all of the characters in a slightly different light. It’s a little puzzling at first, but I liked the tongue-in-cheek style of the narration, particularly as Bell breaks the fourth wall at times. The raison d’être of this second narrative isn’t immediately revealed, but I thought it was both clever and original when its purpose became clear.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, there were a few things that really irked me about this novel. Firstly, I felt patronised as a reader. The author includes some of the traditional rules of fair play in detective stories from the likes of T. S. Eliot and S. S. Van Dine. These are presented as a list, and a few pages later the author adds “I would like to ask the reader to turn back a few pages and read through the Fair Play Rules which you probably skipped earlier". Excuse me?! I read each and every one of those rules as they were presented, and enjoyed picking out the ones that I expect Christie took great joy in ignoring. Who are you to presume otherwise? I am still irked by this, in case that’s not apparent.

To make things worse, the detective’s sidekick is described in those rules of fair play: “his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader”. I believe that Hegarty has grossly underestimated a reader’s intelligence, as Bell's sidekick is, for want of a better term, an idiot. To claim that this individual is only ever so slightly below that of the average reader is, I think, insulting. Finally, I think that if you’re going to incorporate the rules of fair play into your novel that the reader should at least be able to expect you to abide by them.

So, a great premise and an interesting take, but it just didn’t work out for me, and it’s not one that I can honestly recommend, although some readers will enjoy it.

Louise Hegarty's debut novel Fair Play is an inventive new take on the familiar - if somewhat tired - locked-room murder mystery. Abigail gathers her and her brother Benjamin's friends together at an Airbnb for his birthday murder mystery party and, in the morning, Benjamin is dead. At this point, the narrative splits in two halves: the fall-out of events and conversations between Abigail and the characters; and the arrival of an infamous detective named Mr Bell, whose metafictional references to both the novel structure itself and literary tropes of murder mysteries are somewhat interruptive. This is an enjoyable book that presents classic tropes from a different angle, in a way that gets you thinking.

I’m confused what was this supposed to be about. Couldn’t get into this, didn’t like the writing style and sadly this really was not for me. I did not finished hence the 2 stars!