"Our narrator wakes up in a
dripping forest, wearing someone else’s dinner jacket and, he soon realizes,
someone else’s body. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be trapped
inside this stranger. Twigs crack behind him. A heavy object is dropped into
his pocket and a voice rasps in his ear: “East.” Once alone, he pulls out the
object; it’s a silver compass. Eventually our man learns that his name is Aiden
Bishop, and he is here for a reason. A masked figure informs him tersely that
today, a murder will be committed – a murder that won’t seem like a murder.
Bishop has eight chances to solve it. He will relive the same day eight times,
but each morning he’ll wake up in a different body, or “host”. He’ll remember
his experiences in the previous hosts, but if he doesn’t give the masked figure
the name of the killer by day eight, he’ll be returned to day one, memory
wiped, and have to start all over again. As indeed he already has done,
hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.”
I read a few reviews of this book and seemly, a lot of people are divided on it –either you’re going to accept the premise and get lost in the narrative, or you’re going to find everything a little bit hard to swallow. I was intrigued by the premise, that I’ll admit, the whole Groundhogs Day meets Downton Abby meets Agatha Christie meets Quantum Leap meets Doctor Who was a great hook, but I also found the a lot of things wrong with it as well. Part of the problem lay in writer Stuart Turton’s attempt to be clever, to create a locked room mystery, a whodunit that would make the reader want to turn the pages. I mean, it did, but mostly I was hoping for some explanation on how all of this happening. So the whodunit part gets buried under some weird stuff that renders it, oddly, sometimes secondary. Aiden Bishop is also an ineffective “detective,” sometimes coming across as a pathetic hero. But a lot of the characters at Blackheath Manor are paper thin caricatures, especially the footman who is so one dimensional it annoyed me.
The books’ setting seems weird. I know Turton was trying to emulate a lot Christie’s novel surroundings, the late 1920s or 30s, but since everyone in Blackheath Manor is either being blackmailed or doing the blackmail, you think this should’ve been set at some other time. Then there’s the fat shaming. Turton, in the Conversation with the Author at the end of book, claims he liked writing for Lord Cecil Ravencourt, but the during the part when Aiden has “replaced” goes on and on about how hugely overweight (I pictured the fat man from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life) the man is. Both Aiden and Ravencourt sees himself as a disgusting creature, a shameful man, that really borders on awfulness. Sometimes, it became unbearable to read. So because of this, Ravencourt is a lonely man, but rich one and who will enter into a marriage of convenience to help Peter Hardcastle, who is close to losing everything and seems more concerned with this, than the fate of his daughter. Then there is the part where Hardcastle implies Ravencourt to be a homosexual: “In return, he’ll get…Well, you know the rumors about his valets. Good-looking chaps coming and going at all hours.”
Not very
pleasant. And completely pointless, as this does not figure anywhere else in the book.
Finally, Turton’s use of florid and theatrical prose gets maddening quickly. There seems to be no purpose to it (again, another aspect of the setting). All in all, an interesting idea that gets confusing fast and with a ton of twists and turns, a reader might want to have a handy pad of paper and pencil to try and untie the this complex plot.
This book was originally released in the UK with the title The 7 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in 2018. For it's US release it got The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, due to, it seems, to the popular Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which was released in 2017.
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