The Murder at World's End (Stockingham & Pike, #1) by Ross Montgomery Narrator: Joe Jameson, Derek Jacobi
Format: audiobook, eARC
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Stockingham & Pike #1
Pages: 336
Length: 9 hours and 59 minutes
Published by HarperAudio, William Morrow on January 6, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Secrets, murder, and mayhem collide as this unlikely sleuthing duo—an under-butler and a foul-mouthed octogenarian—hunt a killer in a manor sealed against the end of the world.
Cornwall, 1910. On a remote tidal island, the Viscount of Tithe Hall is absorbed in feverish preparations for the apocalypse that he believes will accompany the passing of Halley's Comet. The Hall must be sealed from top to bottom—every window, chimney, and keyhole closed off before night falls. But what the pompous, dishonest Viscount has failed to take into account is the danger that lies within... By morning, he will be dead in his sealed study, murdered by his own ancestral crossbow.
All eyes turn to Steven Pike, Tithe Hall's newest under-butler. Fresh out of Borstal for a crime he didn't commit, he is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. His unlikely ally? Miss Decima Stockingham, the foul-mouthed, sharp as a tack, eighty-year-old family matriarch. Fearless and unconventional, she relishes chaos and puzzles alike, and a murder is just the thrill she's been waiting for.
Together, this mismatched duo must navigate secret passages, buried grudges, and rising terror to unmask the killer before it's too late...
My Review:
This isn’t merely a “locked room” mystery in the classic, “Golden Age” tradition, it goes two steps further to being a locked mansion and even a locked island mystery. Admittedly, by way of a day trip to, well, Crazytown.
Because Viscount Conrad Stockingham-Welt is out of his very tiny mind – not that he’d ever admit either that his mind is tiny or that he’d left all sense behind. He believes he’s a scientific genius. Then again, he also believes that the gases in the tail of Halley’s Comet are poisonous and that the Earth’s imminent 1910 transit through the comet’s tail is going to wipe out all life on the planet.
Except for the few members of Conrad’s family and staff that he has invited to his remote estate off the coast of Cornwall – at World’s End – to wait out the event sealed into the house with him, cut off from the outside world. Literally and figuratively, as Tithe Hall is on a spit of land that will be cut off from the mainland by the tides, AND because he’s ordered that every single person in the house be sealed ALONE into their rooms by blocking all the windows, doors, and even the keyholes from anything outside.
The scientific establishment of the day would tell him he was wrong – no matter how much of a panic the comet is causing in the newspapers and among the general populace. The scientific community certainly knows better and if Conrad were as much of a leading light in that community as he claimed, then he should have as well. Instead, even his non-scientific relatives are certain he’s lost the plot completely. But he controls all the family money and estates, and if he’s wrong that will be proven in the morning when the world survives the cataclysm he believes is coming.
Not that Conrad will be alive to deal with his mistaken beliefs. Because someone at Tithe Hall has taken advantage of the confusion to kill the odious man, leaving an obvious murder victim (no one can shoot a crossbow bolt into their OWN eye), a locked room, a confounding puzzle, and a plethora of possible suspects who should all be in the clear because they were all sealed inside their own rooms.
Except for two people. Either of whom should make a dandy scapegoat for the incompetent police inspector assigned to the case. And he certainly does try. But Decima Stockingham and Steven Pike are more than a match for a glory-seeking incompetent. And even for a diabolically clever murderer.
Escape Rating B+: This is going to be one of the most mixed of mixed feelings reviews. I feel as if I’m on the horns of multiple dilemmas with this book, and that I’m literally being poked by every single one of those horns.
The mystery itself is compelling, riveting, and all of the things it should be. I’m not quite sure it’s exactly a fair play mystery like the Golden Age mysteries that it pays homage to, but it does an excellent job of keeping the reader guessing until almost the very last page.
I mean, I was starting to get glimmers really close to the end, but I wasn’t there yet until the villain finally revealed their previously hidden hands and motives.
Part of what makes this much fun is that the victim so obviously deserved it. And had, in fact, spent decades courting it even as they counted on their privilege to keep it from happening. He was such a complete arsehole – even beyond what we see in the story’s current events – that it’s not a surprise that one of his many victims took the opportunity he handed to them on a silver platter to do him in.
Howsomever, what kept bogging the pace down was the choice of perspective. Or rather, both of the choices of perspective. The story is told from the first-person point of view of Steven Pike, the brand-new under-footman who arrives just as Tithe Hall is closing down for the comet. On the one hand, Pike’s lack of knowledge of or investment in any of the characters makes him a perfect outside observer for the very much insider events. OTOH, he’s an ex-con, a secret that the butler seems to be willing to keep for him. Which leaves Pike a) beholden to the butler in a really big way; and b) scared out of his wits every single minute once the murder is discovered because his outsider status AND his big secret make him an easy scapegoat for everyone.
Because we’re in Pike’s head (very much so with the excellent vocal narration by Joe Jameson) we suffer with him every time he panics internally. And he panics a lot for very good reasons. Howsomever, he panics a LOT.
Being inside his head makes us empathize with him, which means that we feel it whenever he or any of the Hall’s servants get mistreated – which is all the time. They’re treated abominably, expected to cook and clean and bow and scrape, verbally abused at every single turn, AND expected to be grateful for it. (I’m still reflexively cringing at my own past reading of mysteries like this one where that behavior was common and expected and this reader didn’t bat an eye at it.)
There’s also a second narrator, a third person omniscient perspective, who is both observing the movements of the murderer in the shadows AND reading the (real, true) newspaper headlines of the time period. That second narrator is voiced by Sir Derek Jacobi, and, while I enjoyed his parts of the story, I found myself wondering what he was doing here and how he was induced to do this. From a story perspective, the newspaper articles were informative but the attempt at adding suspense by showing the hidden killer’s movements worked less well, at least for this reader. (And Jacobi’s voice sounded a lot like he did when he played Claudius in I, Claudius way back when, which was both nostalgic and just a bit weird. YMMV)
What makes this story ultimately work – and keeps the reader following along – isn’t Pike because he’s not really the protagonist. He is not the one moving events – he’s just reacting to those events, often by quite reasonably quaking in his boots.
The protagonist, the true mover and shaker of this story, is eighty-year-old Decima Stockingham. She’s got a fouler mouth than any sailor, says “fuck” pretty much every other word with great vigor due to constant, extreme provocation by the world and everyone and everything in it – and is absolutely determined to solve the murder.
Just as Pike pushes Decima in her bath chair, she pushes Pike forward, out of his comfort zone, into extreme danger AND manages to corner the killer and save the day.
In the end, as much as the underpinnings of the story, along with Pike’s justified but constant refrain of “Oh, woe is me!” often slowed the pace down – the mystery itself is a delightfully twisted puzzle. It’s very much a combination of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with the scientific misinformation and “locked island” vibes of Erik Larson’s No One Goes Alone, combined with the attitudes of the movie Gosford Park and the public panic of the War of the Worlds 1938 radio broadcast and an ending right out of the TV series Mrs. Bradley Mysteries featuring Dame Diana Rigg and Neil Dudgeon (Rigg was younger than Decima at the time and Dudgeon was a lot better able to stand up for himself than Pike but I think the resemblance between the relationships holds all the same).
All of which leads right into this being the first book in a projected series, featuring Decima Stockingham as a private detective and Steven Pike as her assistant and bath-chair pusher. I’m curious as hell to see how that’s going to go.