The Murder at World's End

Set in May 1910, during the worldwide panic surrounding Halley's Comet's close pass of Earth, the novel follows Stephen Pike, a young man recently released from a Borstal Institution, a reformatory for young offenders, after serving time for Grievous Bodily Harm. Raised by his grandmother after she rescued him from abusive parents, Stephen is desperate for a fresh start. He arrives at Tithe Hall, a grand manor on World's End, a tidal island off the coast of Cornwall, and presents a letter of recommendation to Head Butler Mr. Stokes, claiming that Lettice Welt, a cousin of the estate's owner, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt, arranged his hiring as second footman through a charitable program. Mr. Stokes is suspicious but agrees because the household is desperately short-staffed.

The house is in a state of controlled chaos: windows boarded, sandbags stacked, grounds dug up. The Viscount gathers everyone and announces that poisonous cyanogen gases in the comet's tail will end all life that evening, and that World's End is the only place prepared to survive. His claims are supported by Professor Wolff Müller, a German scientist and co-founder of the Viscount's Cometary Cataclysm Society. The Viscount's relatives are appalled. His cousin Edwin Welt, a Member of Parliament, privately orders the family to stay and contain the damage, revealing he came only because the Viscount's telegram implied the visit would concern the inheritance. The staff seals the entire East Wing airtight, and every person is shut in their bedroom for the night.

Stephen is assigned to spend the night with Miss Decima, the Viscount's elderly aunt, who lives in the old Nursery wing and is feared by the entire staff. Miss Decima reveals the truth: She forged Lettice's handwriting and orchestrated Stephen's hiring because she needed a young, rule-breaking servant to help her observe the comet outside. She is a brilliant, profane scientist whose career was stolen by her nephew, who confiscated her papers and published them as his own. She dismisses his doomsday theories as nonsense, and Stephen wheels her to the island's edge, where she dictates precise astronomical observations. The comet passes harmlessly. A brief interlude reveals that three people did not sleep that night: Miss Decima, the Viscount (who is dead), and the man who watched him die.

The next morning, Stephen discovers the Viscount's body. Lost on the servants' staircases, he ends up outside the sealed study, notices a crossbow bolt missing from a suit of armor, and finds a bloodstain under the door. He and Lowen, the first footman, break down the door together. The room is pitch-black; when Lowen flicks the light switch, the Viscount sits dead in his chair with the crossbow bolt buried in his eye. Mr. Stokes arrives behind Temperance, a young ladies' maid, and drops the breakfast tray. Police search the sealed house and grounds but find nothing. The causeway was impassable all night, and the study door was locked and sealed from the inside. Edwin orders a lockdown: No one may leave before the will reading the following Friday. The housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, reveals that the Viscount's father, Lawrence Welt, also died from a crossbow bolt to the eye in a supposed hunting accident 20 years earlier. Lowen publicly accuses Stephen, the only person not sealed in the East Wing, of the murder.

Miss Decima summons Stephen, and they agree to solve the murder together using scientific reasoning. Inspector Jarvis of Scotland Yard arrives and immediately fixates on Stephen, but Miss Decima intervenes, presenting Stephen's comet observation notes as an alibi and citing a fabricated legal precedent to block the questioning. She then wheels herself into the family breakfast room, shocking the household with her first public appearance in years. Miss Decima, Stephen, and Temperance, who proves sharp and well-read in detective fiction, form an investigative team. Temperance proposes a "machine murder" theory: Someone rigged a device in the study to kill the Viscount after he sealed himself inside. Professor Müller, who was photographing the study on the afternoon before the murder, becomes a key suspect.

The investigation produces several leads. Stephen overhears Edwin learning that the Viscount changed his will just a week before his death and witnesses Lettice blackmailing Müller, though the blackmail later proves unrelated to the murder. The team searches the study but finds no murder device, and Miss Decima finds no secret passages in the building's floor plans. Stephen discovers a hidden target-practice area behind a turbine shed near the river, with dozens of arrow marks at eye height on tree trunks, proving the killer practiced for weeks and is a member of the household staff. Inspector Jarvis publicly accuses Mr. Stokes of masterminding the murder, but Miss Decima dismantles the theory, and Stephen exonerates Stokes of a separate theft accusation. A telephone ruse reveals that the Viscount arrived to change his will accompanied by an unidentified person. Miss Decima prepares a cyanotype, a photographic reproduction made with chemicals and sunlight, from Müller's glass-plate negative to compare the study before and after the murder. The images appear identical, a seeming dead end.

Inspector Jarvis is then found dead in the drawing room, struck by a falling marble bust while he examined the fireplace chimney, having apparently worked out the murder method. Mrs. Pearce reveals the old family scandal: The Viscount had an illegitimate child with Elsie, Miss Decima's former ladies' maid, whom Lawrence Welt banished before his own death. Stephen connects the threads: The Viscount's child, now about 20, is the person who accompanied him to change the will, and the motive is revenge for the abandonment of their mother.

Stephen's offhand mention that the study lights were off when he broke in triggers Miss Decima's breakthrough. The murderer was hiding inside the dark room and slipped out unnoticed before the lights came on. Stephen identifies the change that had nagged him: A butler's mirror, a small convex mirror, had been removed from above the mantelpiece so that no one entering would glimpse a reflection of someone hiding behind them. Before they can act, the power is cut.

Stephen pursues what appears to be Temperance being dragged into the forest and finds Lowen's body, dead for hours. Temperance then reveals herself as the killer, striking Stephen with a hammer. She is Conrad's illegitimate daughter; her mother died destitute, and Temperance spent years planning revenge. She pushes Stephen off a bridge into the raging river, but he catches a sluice gate bar and drags himself back to the house.

He finds Mr. Stokes holding a crossbow aimed at Miss Decima, who holds a lit candle over what she claims is a jar of picric acid. Mr. Stokes confesses his role as accomplice. He was present 20 years earlier when Lawrence Welt died, not from murder but from a drunken accident involving Stokes's father. Conrad forced both Stokeses into silence. Mr. Stokes loved Elsie and, consumed by guilt, helped Temperance when she appeared as Elsie's daughter. The full method emerges: On the night of the murder, Temperance climbed from her bedroom window onto the roof and reached the study chimney. Mr. Stokes lured the Viscount to the fireplace, and Temperance fired the crossbow bolt down the chimney. Mr. Stokes then sealed the fireplace, cleaned the soot, removed the mirror, and waited all night in the dark room. In the morning, Temperance impersonated Mr. Stokes's voice to send Stephen upstairs, then rang the staff bells. When Stephen and Lowen broke down the study door, Mr. Stokes slipped out behind Temperance in the seconds before the lights came on and dropped a deliberately cold teapot to create the illusion he had been in the corridor all along.

Mr. Stokes surrenders and leaves. Miss Decima reveals her jar holds only tea leaves and offers Temperance the chance to flee. Temperance tells Stephen she is sorry and disappears. A newspaper reports that Mr. Stokes is later found dead, having taken his own life and left a confession. Temperance Atkins is never found. At the will reading, the Viscount's fortune passes to Miss Decima, who secures the servants' jobs and plans a scientific scholarship for young women. She invites Stephen to London as her personal attendant and partner in a new detective agency. He accepts, and they sit together watching the fading comet.