The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

This book was quite simply brilliant, and so much more than I was expecting. Like, the blurb sets up a ground-hog day premise, so you go into it with certain expectations and instead the protagonist wakes up with amnesia and thinking a woman has been killed and it just charges along from there. It is intense and utterly immersive. The clues are bread crumbed but never over explained. And the time-travel aspects are used cleverly to move the solution forward while maintaining the mystery. There is no dull rehashing of the laws of time here.

My copy has an afterword from the author about how the book was inspired, in which he describes it as a time-travel, body-hopping Agatha Christie mystery novel and I really can’t describe it better, except to say that none of those things are silly fillers. The author used every element to build a story dripping with gothic (as in dark and forbidding, rather than romantic) atmosphere and dramatic tension.

This is a ride of a book, that spent days camped out in my mind. It also presents powerful themes of, I dont want to say redemption – its not quite that. But of staying true to your principles in the face of cruelty and desperation. I could probably re-read it 100 times and still not have tracked all the clues.

I will be searching for a personal copy, that is for sure.