Sorry, What's Happening Here?

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty

Pages: 288 Genre: It's complicated. Literary fiction wearing a detective outfit.

Rating: 1.5 Star

Kindle Notes and Highlights

This is normally where I'd put a summary, but this book is convoluted and underdeveloped. If you'd like to read the Goodreads description, go ahead. But if you'd actually like to read this book, I would just go in completely blind and let it develop on its own.

Also, normally I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, but I can't talk about this book without spoiling it, so that's just not going to happen this time. Honestly, though, I'd just read my review and skip the book.

When I finished this book, despite having just finished a story attempting to be very moving and emotional, I just felt confused. While this is a creative concept, the execution falls flat and fails to deliver on all of its promises.

In case you haven't read the book, here's the spoiler synopsis to make my review look sense: The story starts with Abigail throwing a murder mystery/New Year's/birthday party for her brother, Benjamin, with a bunch of their friends. In the morning, Benjamin is found dead. We then spend most of the book flipping between post-death Abigail grieving her brother who died from suicide and a Poirot-style detective story investigating Benjamin's murder. If it sounds confusing, it's because it is. The detective story is Abigail creating a narrative to try to rationalize her brother's death.

I think my biggest problem with the book was the way it was structured. If I had consulted the author ahead of time, I would've said to scrap the post-death Abigail chapters entirely and build those details into the detective mystery. Make Abigail an active participant there (the Watson, perhaps, or even just a pushy client). Craft the detective parts in such a way where it feels like the story begins to get corrupted. We start noticing things changing, maybe Abigail is pulling new evidence out of nowhere, characters are starting to act wildly different from how we knew them originally. Build it to its breaking point when it becomes clear that this is, in fact, Abigail's way of trying to make sense of her brother's death, insisting on pointing the finger anywhere that isn't reality. And then write an ending that isn't them randomly on a beach trip as children.

I don't know, I'm not an author, and I'm certainly not this author. But as it was, flipping between goofy detective work and deep-grief Abigail was bizarre. The ending, with Clue The Movie style accusations following Abigail's real experience with the person, felt hollow, like we were just trying to get to the word count. And why were we at the beach at the end? Was I supposed to feel sad for the brother Abigail lost? A little late for that!

As it was, the big twist was predictable, which ruined the entire impact for me. Thankfully I was reading an e-book, so I know exactly when this happened: at 23% I was first suspicious, and at 47% I fully guessed it. And sure, about half way it's too early, but when the gag goes on for the entire book, it certainly felt early. This just made it a confusing book to read instead of an emotional experience. Was I supposed to see the truth for what it was the whole time? If so, why is the book marketed as a murder mystery? Am I supposed to be genuinely enjoying the slightly-goofy tone that always comes from the Poirot-style detectives of this genre, or should I be feeling bad for Abigail? If it's the latter, can the detective tone it down a little? This made the novel feel identity-less, making the "big twist" have an entirely opposite effect at the end.

If you're trying to do this kind of story-changing twist, in addition to having that big emotional pull, it needs to make you look at the entire story differently after the twist. I think of books like The Last House on Needless Street or Fight Club (random pulls, I know). Once you know what the twist is, you cannot read the book the same way again. And even in the moment it's revealed, you can sit there and think back on moments in the book that may have been confusing or random and appreciate what the author was doing. It should feel like you're holding a million puzzle pieces and have just figured out how they work together. In Fair Play, because of the predictability of the twist, caused primarily by the sloppy and indelicate handling of "clues," I never had that moment. So, instead of feeling satisfying and amazing, the moments after the reveal were bland and lifeless. Like, I guess that's it then.

A big aspect of this book was the meta-narrative of both mysteries as a genre and this book itself. It had three lists of Mystery Rules at the start, the detective would reference things based on what chapter they occurred in, and characters seemed to both know and accept their Roles within this mystery (the best friend, the mistress, etc). I would be shocked if the author said she was NOT inspired by the adventures of Ernest Cunningham (an absolute favorite of mine). However, while I understand its role in the narrative, this framing device felt clunky and awkward. It felt more like the author was making fun of the genre than appreciating it for its quirks. Why was it a novel specifically? Whose perspective was it that would break the fourth wall? It felt like an afterthought to the novel, a way for the author to wink at the reader to assure them that Something Was Up, rather than a genuine attempt at creative storytelling.

Furthermore, none of the characters were worth caring about. They were there to fulfill tropes in the metanarrative, which means I knew exactly nothing about them. Does Abigail even like mystery books? I couldn't tell you a single unique detail about her other than her being organized (told outright to me in the first chapter) and a little obsessed with her brother, Benjamin. None of the "suspects" had any real meat to them. Of course, how could they when they existed, to me, almost entirely in Abigail's mind? But even Benjamin, the victim about whom the entire book was about, was about as interesting as a walnut.

Truly, the only thing the author wanted you to care about was the "twist," but that twist is a house built on the sand instead of on the rock. When the wind blows, the entire foundation crumbles, and I'm left looking at a potentially-interesting house that is now just a crumble of wood planks. Your plot twist has to build on an already interesting book. It cannot be the only thing that works.

While it had an interesting concept, this book needed to be workshopped a whole lot before it made its way to me, at least. The characters were boring, the plot was somehow both predictable and confusing, and the emotional impact was entirely lost in a story that barely knew what it was trying to be.