The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

I’m pretty late writing about this one - it’s been a summer. But I’ve embarked on something a little bigger and more ambitious I’m excited to write about soon!

I might have mentioned this before, but this is actually the first of Turton’s three published mystery books. I read them in backwards order after picking up the third one in Osaka after hearing an excellent review. There’s no through-line, except perhaps a hint at the next setting, so there’s no harm in this. Reading it in this order does have it’s advantages, you can see for example how Turton’s exceptional world-building has developed. While this may be the ‘smallest’ of his worlds - that being of a large manor house - it’s by no means ill-considered or described. Considering the depth Turton puts into such a relatively small space, it’s all the more impressive the depth of character on show.

A man wakes up alone in the forest and witnesses an assault. He finds his way to a large manor house where everybody already knows him. He spends a day putting himself together to find the event’s host - Evelyn Hardcastle - is murdered at 11pm. And at 11pm our protagonist wakes up somewhere else, as someone else. His job? To be placed into multiple party-guests until he figures out who will go on to kill Evelyn. He deals with other versions of himself as well as shady figures who seem to be running this show. Through out the book we dig deeper into the complex story behind the scenario, and if our protagonist can escape. In this way it’s slightly more like the latest book - The Last Murder at the End of the World - in that we’re discovering the mystery of the conceit as well as the mystery of the murder. Turton cements himself as absolutely one of my favourite authors, and one I’d recommend to anybody.

Each character we wake up as is painted so wonderfully, from their physicality and body shape to the way the others at the party treat them. And the video-game-like setup is simple but incredibly effective at building the sense of a ticking clock, and that feeling of “OH! That was THAT guy!”