Fair Play
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Fair Play
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Andrew Wincott
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Aoife McMahon
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By:
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Louise Hegarty
About this listen
A LOCKED ROOM.
A HIDDEN LIFE.
Abigail and her brother Benjamin have always been close. To celebrate his birthday, Abigail hires a grand old house and gathers their friends together for a murder mystery party. As the night goes on, they drink too much and play games. Relationships are forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses someone they shouldn’t, someone else’s heart is broken.
In the morning, everyone wakes up – except Benjamin.
Suddenly everything is not quite what it seems. An eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin’s killer. The house now has a butler, a gardener and a housekeeper. This is a locked-room mystery, and everyone is a suspect.
As Abigail attempts to fathom her brother’s unexpected death in a world that has been turned upside down, she begins to wonder whether perhaps the true mystery might have been his life . . .
The characters were well developed and the cliche of the detective cleverly executed.
Unfortunately, the story failed its own well laid out rules for a murder mystery. This was a sad, because with a little more ingenuity and perhaps some more clarity between the change of eras, it could have been exceptional.
I would be very interested to read Louise’s next book, because she writes beautifully, but the plot has to hold more tightly together and I personally need either at most just alternatives or more closure.
Great idea, beautifully written, but left disappointed at the end.
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The disjointed narrative structure doesn't help either. It took me quite a while to realise there was a dual narrative going on; I was left perplexed for a few chapters about the lack of internal consistency before I worked out what was going on. It is in essence, two stories in one. Neither one succeeds particularly well in its own right, and seems reliant on the other to paper over its limitations ('neither of us is all that convincing, but hey! at least there are two of us...').
The performances are contradictory in that one narrator uses an accent from the South of Ireland, whereas the other (who isn't Irish) opts for a much more Northern Irish accent. Not dreadful, but grating enough to be a distraction.
There are some elements to be enjoyed, some decent characterisation and some genuinely funny bits (the protagonist's encounter with HR is hilarious) but the repetitious ending is both obvious and tedious, and the epilogue is mawkish and seems tacked on to hammer home the subtext of the book.
I'm disappointed, but only partly because I had such high hopes.
A bit of a mess really
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