Fair Play

The novel opens on New Year's Eve as Abigail arrives early at Yew Tree House, a rented Palladian-style country house in rural Ireland, to prepare for a combined murder mystery party and birthday celebration for her brother Benjamin. She picks up a birthday cake, tours the property, and hides handmade clues for the evening's game: a crumpled love letter, a theatre ticket stub, a monogrammed handkerchief, and a champagne bottle with fingerprint stickers.

The guests arrive throughout the afternoon. Barbara, Benjamin's work friend attending for the first time, comes first and sits nervously at the breakfast bar. Cormac, a university friend of Benjamin, and his girlfriend Olivia arrive next, along with Stephen, a friend Abigail has long had a crush on. She is privately pleased that Stephen's girlfriend has gone home for Christmas. Finally, Benjamin arrives with Margaret, his ex-fiancée, and Declan, a childhood friend who has been slowly drifting from Benjamin without realizing it.

The group takes an afternoon walk, exploring a ruined abbey and graveyard. Abigail spots Benjamin standing alone in a doorway, eyes closed, face turned skyward. Back at the house, they change into Jazz Age costumes and begin the murder mystery game. After two hours of searching for clues and theatrical interrogations, no one guesses the killer. Benjamin, cast as the murderer, reveals himself, having stayed quiet throughout.

At midnight, the group counts down and sings "Happy Birthday." As the party winds down, the remaining five sit on the floor sharing memories of Abigail and Benjamin's late mother. Benjamin tries to prompt Abigail's memory of finding a duckling under their father's car, but she recalls nothing. After Benjamin goes to bed, Stephen and Abigail clean up outside by the firepit. He wraps his jacket around her, takes her cold hands, and pulls her close. They kiss gently, then part for the night.

Before dawn, Abigail rises to prepare breakfast. Benjamin does not come down. Stephen reports the bedroom door is locked with no answer. They knock, call his name, and phone him, hearing it ring inside. Declan breaks open the door. Abigail pushes past the others and puts a hand to Benjamin's chest. He is cold.

Part Two introduces a structural shift, preceded by epigraphs from Don Quixote and Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a Cast of Characters in golden age detective fiction style, and three sets of "Fair Play Rules" for detective stories, including S. S. Van Dine's eighteenth rule: A crime must never turn out to be a suicide. The final line of the Cast reads: "Benjamin is dead." From here, the novel alternates between a stylized detective narrative, in which a consulting detective named Auguste Bell investigates Benjamin's death as a locked-room mystery, and italicized interludes depicting Abigail's real-life grief. The detective chapters represent Abigail's attempt to construct a story explaining her brother's death; the interludes show the unresolvable reality of her loss.

Bell examines the crime scene. A doctor declares the death a suicide, citing a locked door, a broken alarm clock, and an empty bottle of sleeping pills. Bell notices a gold earring fall from the dead man's pyjama pocket and discreetly keeps it. He interviews Abigail, who insists Benjamin had no enemies, no financial troubles, and no sleep problems, and rejects the suicide ruling by citing Van Dine's eighteenth rule. The household staff provide conflicting testimony: The maid overheard Benjamin and Stephen arguing that afternoon, while the butler reveals Benjamin and Barbara were having an affair. Bell finds a date book with the entry "ring FWC," a reference to Benjamin's solicitors, Freeman, Wills, Crofts & Associates.

The interludes track Abigail through funeral planning. Her aunt, her only living relative, insists on burial. Abigail refuses religious elements, noting the Catholic Church's historical exclusion of those who die by suicide. At the graveside, she realizes the family plot now holds three coffins and has a panic attack. On a bench afterward, she tells Margaret: "Don't bury me by myself." Other passages follow Abigail through days of paralysis, compulsive phone-checking, and a workplace mediation that devolves into a colleague crying about Abigail's loss while Abigail sits uncomforted.

Bell interviews each suspect, uncovering layers of tension, debt, and concealment. Stephen admits to arguing with Benjamin about their one-sided friendship. Margaret reports overhearing Barbara making a tense phone call. A local innkeeper recalls seeing Benjamin, Margaret, and Declan stop for car oil and overhearing Benjamin tell Margaret she should have moved on. Barbara denies a romantic involvement with Benjamin but reveals someone tried her bedroom door during the night. Declan admits to gambling debts and wandering drunkenly upstairs. In a metafictional turn, Bell's assistant Sacker consults the novel itself, reading the Cast of Characters and a "cluefinder" in the back pages before Bell stops him.

In the interludes, Abigail visits each friend seeking answers. Stephen reveals he is moving to Warsaw; when she confronts him about their kiss, he dismisses it as meaningless, and she leaves in tears. Cormac reveals that years earlier, Benjamin drunkenly asked him on a bridge whether he had ever thought about jumping off and said he himself had considered it. Cormac dismissed this at the time and never raised it again. Olivia, whose uncle died by suicide, tells Abigail that suicidal impulses can be fleeting and that there may never be a neat ending. In therapy, Abigail's therapist suggests her search for a narrative is part of grieving but warns against fixating on a conclusion, proposing she might arrive at "a truth" without knowing every detail.

The detective narrative then presents six successive solutions, each accusing a different suspect: Stephen of strangling Benjamin, Margaret of poisoning him, Cormac and Olivia of a joint killing, Barbara of involvement in a jewellery-smuggling ring, and Declan of killing to stay in Benjamin's will. After each accusation, Bell privately admits doubt or is proven wrong. In the final solution, Bell turns to Abigail: "You are the murderer, Abigail. You killed your brother." The narrative states: "And Abigail nearly admitted it." This is not a literal confession but an expression of survivor's guilt, the self-blame of someone who could not prevent her brother's death.

In the interludes, Abigail searches Benjamin's belongings for clues. She and Margaret clear out his apartment. She meets Barbara, who describes Benjamin as perceptive, someone who noticed when colleagues were struggling. She retrieves Benjamin's phone from the Garda (Irish police) station and searches through everything: a Tinder conversation that trailed off, a Google search for "quicksand," an anonymous Instagram account. The last text between them is her asking, "Will you be here soon?" He never replied. She visits Declan, who tells her: "Maybe. But we didn't. And we don't have a time machine to go back and change things." Her aunt takes her on mundane errands, and Abigail feels relaxed for the first time in months. A recurring passage shows Abigail drafting and redrafting her account of Christmas Day with Benjamin, searching for a clue she cannot find, before reducing it to its barest facts: "It was a normal Christmas. Benjamin was in a good mood."

The novel closes with a luminous childhood memory. Their mother calls them downstairs for a trip to the beach. At a familiar cove, the children swim, explore rock pools, and build an elaborate sandcastle kingdom. Benjamin gives Abigail a piece of green sea glass. He tries to fill the moat with seawater, but it keeps sinking; his father explains there is no foundation to hold the water. As the tide comes in, Benjamin watches the ocean swallow his creation. When the water retreats, it leaves only an ugly mound of wet sand. The family packs up, leaving nothing behind to show they were ever there. They close the car doors and drive home.