The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

I first became aware of this book thanks to the extremely funny coincidence of two books named The Seven _ of Evelyn H_ coming out within the span of about a year . This book has nothing in common with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo but the two will always be linked in my mind and in fact I don’t think I would have read either of them if the other didn’t exist (fun fact, in the UK this book is just called The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the name was changed in America to avoid confusion with Evelyn Hugo. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Reid’s book about the writing of the memoirs of a Hollywood starlet although it did have its strong points. Fortunately for me I liked this one a lot more.

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has an incredibly intriguing premise, which is good for any novel but is especially nice for a whodunnit. A man is given one task: find out who is going to kill Evelyn Hardcastle. To do so, he relives the same day eight times, each as a different person who is there on the night of her death. It’s an awesome idea, however it requires a very strong storyteller not only to write it, but to keep the plot stable at all. There are so many ways that a book like this could fail. It can get too convoluted. It can have plot holes. It can get too caught up in all its details. The fact that Turton tackled this concept with his first book is very impressive and I will say he succeeds as a storyteller throughout Evelyn Hardcastle’s 458 pages.

The most important thing that Turton succeeds at throughout Evelyn Hardcastle is making it a blast to read. Whodunnits are at their best when the author drops clues here and there about the central mystery, leading the reading experience to become a game of author vs. reader. I will say that I did not come close to unraveling most of the mysteries laid out in the book but I totally believe that a more astute reader who has more experience with whodunnits could have figured out most of this book’s puzzles.

This book does go off the rails a bit towards the end, when Turton tries to use it to explore deeper concepts that don’t fit all that well here. I get the ideas that he is trying to raise, but this is not the book to talk about them. This book is sci-fi adjacent and sci-fi loves to use its premises to tackle questions about humanity but I think it’s at its worst when it leans too heavy into that angle.

All in all this is an amazing time and I would highly recommend it to any mystery fan.