Fair Play 🂬

By Louise Hegarty

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty is a clever, playful, and quietly devastating book that blends a classic murder mystery setup with an unexpectedly sharp exploration of grief and loss.

The story opens with Abigail preparing a Murder Mystery themed birthday party for her brother Benjamin at a rented country house on New Year’s Eve. The guest list is a tight circle of friends, each carrying their own tensions, histories, and unspoken complications.

There is champagne, festivity, and carefully staged intrigue. By morning, however, the fiction of the party gives way to something far darker. Everyone wakes up except Benjamin.

From this point, the book takes an intriguing and structurally inventive turn. The narrative divides into two distinct yet thematically intertwined strands. In one, the eminent detective Auguste Bell arrives to investigate Benjamin’s death, complete with all the stylised trappings of golden age crime fiction.

In the other, Abigail grapples with the emotional devastation of loss, her perspective steeped in confusion, guilt, and the slow, disorienting reality of grief.

The Bell centred sections are written with wit and self awareness, leaning into the conventions of classic detective stories while knowingly subverting them.

Readers familiar with traditional murder mysteries will find much to enjoy in the playful structure, layered clues, and overtly meta touches. The narrative delights in its own artifice, at one point openly referencing the mechanics of storytelling itself, which adds humour without undermining the tension.

Running alongside this, Abigail’s emotional journey grounds the book in something far more intimate and affecting. Her struggle to comprehend the death, to assign meaning, and to wrestle with the relentless question of why feels painfully authentic.

The contrast between the stylised detective narrative and the rawness of Abigail’s experience is striking, yet ultimately cohesive. Both strands revolve around the same fundamental impulse: the desperate need to understand death.

Hegarty handles this tonal duality with impressive control. The book shifts between playfulness and heartbreak without feeling disjointed, allowing each narrative thread to illuminate the other.

Thematically, the parallels are compelling. While Bell methodically dissects motives and suspects, Abigail is consumed by self interrogation, wondering whether anything could have altered the outcome.

The final chapter provides a particularly fascinating conclusion, drawing subtle and elusive connections between the narrative layers. Rather than offering simple resolution, it invites reflection, reinforcing the book’s interest in ambiguity, perception, and the stories people construct around loss.

Fair Play is an inventive, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant book that will especially appeal to readers who enjoy experimental literary fiction and genre bending narratives. It is as much about grief as it is about mystery, using one to deepen the other.

Thank you to the team at Picador for sending such a fun book-package! The book is out now and available to purchase.

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