This is a book I started in 2020, and is my last book to be completed before my new reading challenge begins (a month late, but hey, I seem to be a bit of a slow reader at the moment!). I have a feeling that The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton could be a bit of a "marmite"book - you love it, or hate it. Fortunately, I am fall into the former camp. We start with a man coming to his senses in a forest. He doesn't know who he is, or how he got there, but when he hears a scream and sees a man chasing a woman through the trees, one memory strikes home - the woman is called Anna and she is important to him. He hears a shot and assumes that things have taken a tragic turn, but before he gets a chance to find out, someone creeps up behind him, thrusts a compass into his hand and gives him an instruction - "East!" He flees from the forest and heads towards a country house. As he bursts in to try and get help, the people there seem to know who he is and try to take care of him. As his day of confusion progresses, he comes across a whole gamut of characters, many of whom are deeply unpleasant. The only one who seems to want to help him find out what happened to Anna is Evelyn Hardcastle. So when she dies at the end of the evening, it is an horrific shock. But the next day, Aidan wakes up in a different person, and the day starts all over again. With the guidance of a shady figure he calls The Plague Doctor, he is told that he must solve the murder, and that the day will repeat in different hosts until he does, but he only has a set number of hosts. If, at the end of that time, the murder isn't solved, he goes all the way back to the beginning, with all of his memories removed once more. With me so far? This is most definitely a novel where you have to keep on your toes, with Aidan switching between hosts as each one loses consciousness. As I listened to the audio version, which I do when I can't sleep, I found that when I had nodded off and woke up late, I kept having to rewind as Aidan had switched bodies ... and I knew I couldn't afford to miss one single clue. There are so many threads and switches in action, or the same action but from different perspectives. It's a cracking read for anyone who thinks ... what if Christopher Nolan took on an Agatha Christie novel? The development of the main character, who has to fight with the character of whoever's body he is inhabiting at that moment in time, as well as the relationships he forms, is really clever. We slowly start to unravel the sequence of events, and when Aidan realises he can actually change those events, things get really interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it did surprise me, which you wouldn't have thought it would after reliving the same day so many times. Complex it may be, but still totally accessible. Would definitely recommend.
My STAR rating: FOUR.
Length: 528 print pages.
Price I paid: £2.85
Formats available: print, unabridged audio download, audio CD, ebook.
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