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

 

This is a strange murder mystery, told in something that looks like a post-apocalyptic version of *R.U.R.* (look it up, it's where the word "robot" comes from) but below the surface is probably not quite as post-apocalyptic as it seems. At a minimum, there's something like hope, once the humans are dead and just the robots remain. Of course, it turns out the apocalypse isn't really one for the robots, that's been a lie the whole time (and I never trusted it, not even from the start) and the nigh-omniscient narrator is about as reliable as Humbert Humbert, but plausibly less moral. Also, of course, the author plays some Dame Agatha-ish games by having the "murder" being solved turn out to be a suicide. The writing itself is pretty good, though the characters tend to blend together into either the "elders" (the humans who survived and are the rulers of the island) and the "villagers" (who are mostly subservient to the elders, as they've been designed to be) with a couple of exceptions among the villagers. For a moment I thought I was catching stray whiffs of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," but that was mostly not right, I think.