Review: Fair Play

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Abigail's brother Benjamin's birthday is on New Year's Day and so, to make it special they started a tradition of booking an AirBnB stay with a group of old friends and Abigail meticulously plans a murder mystery evening, loosely based around a theme. This year things are a bit tense, Benjamin has invited his PA Barbara of all people to join them, which won't go down well with his ex-fiance Margaret. Abigail is glad that Benjamin's school friend Stephen is coming alone, his girlfriend has gone home to Poland for Christmas, because she's always harboured a bit of a crush on him. Then there's another of Benjamin's old friends Cormac, and his newish girlfriend Olivia, and finally Declan, he grew up with Abigail and Benjamin but hasn't really grown-up, Abigail understands Benjamin has had to bail him out with money more than once. So they all meet up in this big old Irish house and drink champagne and play their murder mystery, but in the morning Benjamin is found dead, locked in his room. The police believe it's suicide but Abigail is sure its murder so she hires the renowned detective Augustus Bell to discover the truth. As another reader said, so far so good, although I found the writing style of the omnipotent narrator a bit irritating.

But then, the story changes, new characters are added, the house is no longer an AirBnB but Benjamin and Abigail's family home. New information is given about each of the characters (just like in a murder mystery game). The reader gets 'treated' to tracts of rules about classical murder mysteries (many of which have been flagrantly broken time and time again). Augustus Bell himself seems to know he is a character in a book as he often informs people that something will happen later ie in chapter sixteen I will ask three of the guests to try to climb into Benjamin's window, he also refers to previous cases by the sort of name they would be given in a Golden Age mystery. I also noted a fair few references to other detectives of the Golden Age eg (Lord Peter) Wimsey and Tommy and Tuppence.

So we now have two stories running in parallel, one an homage/send-up of a Golden Age mystery with overlapping characters but different stories (eg in one story Benjamin runs the family business whereas in the other he is merely an employee at a company). The formatting of the ARC didn't help as there were asterisks cross-referencing to footnotes relating actions/characters to mystery theories but sometimes they were several pages apart.

There were also some random passages where things were repeated but altered slightly five or six times on the trot, eg Abigail's recounting of how she and Benjamin spent Christmas.

(view spoiler)[Much like a hapless Golden Age detective Bell ends up accusing pretty much each of the suspects, giving plausible motives and methods - but some of them were ludicrous - if he had been strangled even a hapless detective could have seen the ligature marks on his neck? And again, the whole 'aha, I know who did it round up the suspects' bit was repeated each time - I'm not sure if this is supposed to be one of those books where you choose your ending? (hide spoiler)]And then it just abruptly ends. No resolution of any description, people confess and then it seems Bell dismisses their confessions and accuses someone else.
This to me was just a hot mess. Some reviewers have raved about this as a study in coming to terms with loss, well I'm impressed that they found that from this hotchpotch of tales that go nowhere.

I received an ARC from the Publisher via NetGalley.

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