The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton *****

Although this book dates back to 2018, I came across it after reading and loving Stuart Turton's third novel from 2024, The Last Murder at the End of the World. Each is a convoluted murder mystery that works very differently to a conventional police procedural. I think The Last Murder is somewhat better for a couple of reasons - but that doesn't take away from the brilliance of this book.

The trivial reason I slightly prefer the later novel is that it is just the right length - The Seven Deaths is a little too long. But more significantly, in The Last Murder, we the readers really don't know what's going on for much of the narrative and have to gradually piece things together. Here we quickly do understand the context - it's the central character who takes considerably longer to get his head around what's happening.

The setting is a decaying country house, somewhere around the 1920s. The central character is tasked with solving a murder mystery, each day occupying the body of a different character in the same waking hours as he tries to piece things together. This is where the fantasy comes in - this is not a dream, but a really situation set up by some mysterious external force as a dramatic answer to crime and punishment. It's not a criticism to say that this is fantasy - it's a wonderful example of how the genre can be used to do far more than a tedious swords and sorcery title ever could.

If I were to be really picky, a couple of small things were mildly irritating. A character who has never driven before is able to drive just by putting his foot on the pedal and going, something that would hardly apply to a car of the period which would have stalled in seconds. And they are French windows, not French doors, for goodness sake!

But that entirely misses the point. This novel won a couple of major awards, and it deserves it. To say the plot is convoluted understates it by several levels - yet the reader doesn't get lost, simply drawn into the intrigue of it all. Whether or not there are seven deaths is beside the point (in fact, the US version calls it 7½ deaths). And there are plenty more murders along the way. It's without doubt a truly original stunner.

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