A review by lilipopmlml
The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

This book started off slow for me. The narration is in first-person omniscient POV that is withholding information through Abi, an artificial intelligence system, which works given the blended genres of the book but did take a little while to get used to. I think having a narrator withhold information from the reader can be more frustrating to read than tagging along with a character as they discover the information, but since most of the book focuses on Emory, it ended up working out. The book overall is a blend of sci-fi, apocalyptic dystopian, and mystery. While the clues and turns were fun and each one seemed to add new pieces to the puzzle, the red herrings all seemed to point back and forth between the same two characters and the actual ending felt slightly more "gotcha" than earned. While this won't end up on my top ten list of favorite books, it was a worthwhile read overall if you are in the mood for something adventurous that makes you think just a tad without requiring calculus-level backflips.

I think if Emory had found a last, final clue in person instead of just remembering some last detail, the ending would have felt a little more earned. For a book that built so much tension around the apocalyptic aspect, that tension felt pointless at the end when the only two characters that died were the two we weren't really supposed to like the entire book anyways. And the Adil staged the murder to send everyone on a wild goose chase was the only loose thread-tie up that felt completely thrown in to me, as he would have had no way to know that Thea and Neima's fight would survive him smashing Neima's memory gem and a single fingernail wouldn't have convicted Thea otherwise.