The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.

Book Review by Cari Mayhew.

This book is an all-singing, all-dancing time-travel-mystery-thriller – the plot is simultaneously absurd and delightful.

The action kicks off immediately when the Protagonist wakes up with no recollection of who he is – and witnesses a murder.  But events take an even stranger turn the following day when he wakes up as someone else, replaying the events of the previous day.

Effectively, the Protagonist takes the roles of several different versions of himself in randomly assigned host bodies, replaying the events of the same day over and over.  His predicament is a form of rehabilitative imprisonment, and he soon learns he can only escape this predicament by solving the murder.

There are plots and subplots galore, with juicy gossip at every turn, and I reveled in it!  With so much going on, I had no pause to try and figure out who the murderer was.  It became quite hard to keep up even before I had reached the halfway mark.  As I went along the book, I found that the author was making reference to a lot of things that had slipped my mind.

The Protagonist struggles with ascertaining and maintaining his true identity and struggles to ascertain and assure himself of who’s a friend and who’s a foe.  He tries to leave clues for himself and his helpers but his host bodies alternatively provide assistance and impediments.

The Protagonist solves the central murder with 20% of the book left to go – he’s still on a mission to do the save the others in his situation.  And with 10% of the book left he sets out to solve another murder on the same premises.

The author uses an old-fashioned but bearable writing style.  One thing I particularly enjoyed about the book was how the soul of the Protagonist reacts in the bodies of different hosts, all with different tendencies and propensities.

It was a pleasure to read, and I may have enjoyed it more had I been able to keep track of the minutiae.