Have you ever dreamed you’re running away from something, though you’re not quite sure from what or whom? Or that you’re lost in a forest? Or where you see yourself and in the dream you look totally different, but you know it’s you?
This is pretty much where the protagonist of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle finds himself in chapter one – although, as far as we know, it isn’t a dream.
“I’m standing in a forest…I must have been running but I can’t remember why…I’m cut short by the sight of my own hands. They’re bony, ugly. A stranger’s hands. I don’t recognise them at all.”
What follows is a whodunit with a difference. The protagonist (real name Aiden Bishop) is a guest at Blackheath House, a remote crumbling country pile, where he is tasked with solving a murder. So far, so normal(ish). The spin is that the murder hasn’t yet happened – it will take place at the Masquerade Ball that evening – and Aiden will live the same day eight times as eight different people or ‘hosts’. If he fails to solve the murder by midnight in his final ‘host’ his memories will be stripped and the cycle will begin again.
Murder mysteries don’t make my reading list as a rule, but a time-shifting, body-hopping murder mysterythat won the Costa First Novel Award in 2018? Bring it on!
As well as the impending murder, there’s an even bigger mystery that needs solving. Who is the man in the Plague Doctor costume who explains the rules of the “game”? Who are the two other people like Aiden “wearing the bodies of guests and servants”? Why are they trapped in Blackheath and why can only one of them leave? Who is “Anna”, the name Aiden woke up shouting? And – more fundamentally – how can it be happening?
Turton says his inspiration came from reading Agatha Christie novels as a child and wanting to write one, and The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle contains many elements you’d associate with Christie’s work: big country house, posh people, secrets and lies, an impossible murder. But it’s certainly not a pastiche (as you’ve probably gathered by now): if this is Agatha, then it’s Agatha on acid.
I was hooked from the first page right through to the last, found it hard to tear myself away, and at the end felt like turning back to the start and reading it all over again. If you only read one novel this year, make it this one – but prepare to have your brain fried and your mind blown.
Rating: ***** One of the best books I’ve ever read.
whatcathyread 
Thank you Cathy for buying it as part of my birthday present! Just finished it; agree with your assessment. Although, as some of my students used to say,” Me head’s kebabbed!”