Fair Play, Louise Hegarty
Fair Play, Louise Hegarty
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
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Fair Play
A Novel

Author: Louise Hegarty

Narrator: Andrew Wincott, Aoife McMahon

Unabridged: 7 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Harper

Published: 04/22/2025

Synopsis

“Louise Hegarty’s genre-splicing debut is a treat—clever, confident, and always surprising, a mystery story that ingeniously escapes the locked room of the genre to take on the biggest questions of life and death.”—Paul Murray, author of The Bee StingFor fans of Anthony Horowitz and Lucy Foley, a wonderfully original, genre-breaking literary debut from Ireland that’s an homage to the brilliant detective novels of the early twentieth century, a twisty modern murder mystery, and a searing exploration of grief and loss.A group of friends gather at an Airbnb on New Year’s Eve. It is Benjamin’s birthday, and his sister Abigail is throwing him a jazz-age Murder Mystery themed party. As the night plays out, champagne is drunk, hors d’oeuvres consumed, and relationships forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses the wrong person; someone else’s heart is broken.In the morning, all of them wake up—except Benjamin.As Abigail attempts to wrap her mind around her brother’s death, an eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin's killer. In this mansion, suddenly complete with a butler, gardener and housekeeper, everyone is a suspect, and nothing is quite as it seems. Will the culprit be revealed? And how can Abigail, now alone, piece herself back together in the wake of this loss?Gripping and playful, sharp and profoundly moving, Fair Play plumbs the depths of the human heart while subverting one of our most popular genres.

About Louise Hegarty

Louise Hegarty’s work has appeared in Banshee, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Works. She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. Her short story “Getting the Electric” has been optioned by Fíbín Media. She lives in Cork, Ireland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jessica on January 19, 2025

2.5 stars. I think we need to call a moratorium on Meta Murder Mysteries. This one, in many ways, is more successful than the others I've read in the last few years. But even if it is not a terrible concept, in the end it is just gimmick and not much else. Sometimes a concept is not enough to sustai......more

Goodreads review by Ceecee on September 07, 2024

You might be lucky enough to receive an invitation to a Murder Mystery Night this New Years Eve of 2022 which also celebrates Benjamin’s birthday. Or maybe it’s unlucky, you decide! It’s meticulously well organised by Benjamin’s sister Abigail, dress code is jazz age. Perfect. Where’s the location?......more

Goodreads review by Aoife on April 05, 2025

It’s been a while since I read a book in a day, but Fair Play, Louise Hegarty’s debut novel, ended up being a hard one to put down, and my sunny front garden bench proved a perfect reading spot today. Fair Play isn’t a book that everyone is going to love - it’s genre-defying and it might feel unsati......more

Goodreads review by Peter on June 15, 2025

This is such a clever book. If I'm being totally honest, I'm not sure I grasped it entirely but it was refreshing to read something so inventive and different. The action begins in a large country house, where Abigail has arranged a murder mystery party for her friends. There is her brother Benjamin......more

Goodreads review by Kate on October 09, 2025

Well what on earth was the point of that? No, I'm serious. Other than an exercise in writing a "different" type of murder mystery and one in which you find yourself not entirely sure that there even was one by the final page. And speaking of the final pages - why were they even there? Yes, I am dissa......more

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