The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton

[goodreads]

Title: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (A.k.a. The 7 1/2 deaths...)
Author: Stuart Turton
Genre: Historical fiction, suspense
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: 505
Date read: January, 2022

At a party thrown by her parents, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed - again.

She's been murdered hundreds of times, and each day, Aiden Bishop is too late to save her. The only way to break this cycle is to identify Evelyn's killer. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is desperate to stop him ever escaping Blackheath...


Absolutely brilliant concept - and fortunately really good execution as well.

A bit slow to start. The book is told in first person (for obvious reasons) and in present tense - both of which make sense and are definitely necessary for the book to work, but it does mean that when the main character is clueless... so are we as the readers! - so it took a bit of time for the book to set the stage and get properly into the action. But once that happened? I did NOT want to put it down again and would have finished much faster if it hadn't been for those pesky things called "work" and "sleep".

A time-traveling detective is not something I thought I needed in my books, but it absolutely works. Imagine "Murder on the Orient Express", but instead of Poirot interrogating all the suspects about the night of the murder, he experiences it over and over again from different viewpoints. In fact, the atmosphere was SO Agatha Christie'esque that I felt very vindicated when the author admitted to her being his inspiration in his afterword X-D

(But give this a shot even if you aren't a fan of Agatha Christie. I'm not, and it totally worked for me!)

There are a lot of characters to keep straight (which is harder than usual, thanks to all the jumping around!) so I very much appreciated the list of characters in the front of the book, and returned often to both it and the map of the house.

This is definitely not a book you want spoiled, and while the back blurb is kinda necessary for the beginning to make sense, the less you know ahead of time, the better. THAT SAID... I'm really looking forward to reading it again - knowing all I know now and trying to put all the clues together faster. I can't remember when I last flipped this much back and forth while reading a book, trying to keep all the separate threads sorted.

Really, really well written. Highly recommended.