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Fair Play

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Fair Play

By: Louise Hegarty
Narrated by: Andrew Wincott, Aoife McMahon
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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 . . .

©2025 Louise Hegarty (P)2025 Macmillan Australia Audio International Mystery & Crime Literature & Fiction Mystery Fiction Heartfelt
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I had high hopes for this book, as it was very well reviewed in the Times, and the genre is one that I enjoy. However it is far too pleased with how meta it is being (indeed desperately trying to be) to concern itself with cohesion or internal consistency. In the attempt to cram absolutely every possibly trope of the genre in, the author ends up creating a pastiche that's too densely packed, like a chocolate cake that's just too rich. The never ending procession of self reference just ends up coming across as a bit smug. The book is delighted at how clever it's being, but spares little thought for the appetite of the reader for a gluttonous feast of genre tropes. It constantly tips knowing winks at its own in jokes - just not at the reader.

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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