The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

I’ve heard of Stuart Turton a lot; his books are popular enough to always be checked out at the library. So when this one, his latest, showed up on Netgalley, I grabbed it. And read it and read it and read it some more. It took days to get through, and I really did try to like it, but in the end, it just wasn’t fork me.
I’d like to think I’m aware enough and objective enough of a reader/reviewer to be able to tell when the book is a dud or when it just isn’t my thing. This one seems to be firmly in the latter category.
Reader/book chemistry is a very real thing, and the nicely titled The Last Murder at The End of the World and I just didn’t have much chemistry.
Intellectually, I appreciated it. The story is smart and original, something that’s difficult to find in modern clichéd mystery thrillers. The fan of dystopian fiction in me was delighted by the setting. The fan of character-driven sci-fin in me appreciated the meditation on life and intelligence, organic and artificial, and the value of it—a theme tightly interwoven throughout the narrative. As a reader and a writer, I appreciated the language.
But then there were the unignorable facts that I didn’t much care for any of the characters and found the plot, especially the murder mystery itself, to be excessively, exhaustively convoluted. That made the novel drag for me and it the end, outweighed the pluses. I’m uprating it some for the cleverness. User mileage may (and I’m sure, will) vary. Thanks Netgalley.