A (Demanding) Review:. The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by…

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Tutton

I got this book as a Christmas present from my boyfriend who is slightly afraid of my passionate consumption of mysteries, thrillers, and true crime documentaries. He has no personal interest in these topics, and while he loves to listen to me gush, it’s time that I expand my thoughts beyond my household and onto the internet where you can easily click away if you don’t like it, instead of pressing the pillow over your head while I ramble on about the timeline for the fourth time. The back of the book describes the novel as “a kaleidoscopic mystery” and one of the inside blurbs calls it an Agatha Christie/Terry Pratchett LSD-fueled love child.

You don’t need me to tell you why I dove in. Read that again. How could I not?

Here we go, the once-over: Our narrator wakes up with no memory of who he is (classic), running through a moody English forest with the name Anna on his mind and a gunshot ringing in the distance (not classic). He learns that he, the mind called Aiden Bishop, is the same as the body he currently inhabits, and that he will live out the actions of various bodies in a quantum loop to witness the death of wealthy heiress, Evelyn Hardcastle, from all angles. Aiden has eight days to reveal the truth about Evelyn Hardcastle’s death or risk being quantum blinked out of existence by the laws of time and space, according to a seemingly omniscient overseer disguised as a rich man’s footman hiding in the estate.

Oh, and there’s other people who are guest-starring in other bodies and if they get the answer before Aiden does, he blinks out of existence.

And if he sleeps, he wakes up in a different body that can override the host’s will in order to act out the day as intended.

And there’s a masquerade so you don’t know who anyone is.

Also, there’s tea (it’s England).

If that once-over is any indication, this book is dense and interconnected with pushpins and thread on a detective corkboard somewhere in Tutton’s writing space. The level of organization it takes to keep up with over 400 polished pages of mystery is, I think, only possible if the author is fixated or on a crazy number of stimulants. Seriously imagine it; one correct version of the day where Evelyn is meant to die, the eight characters that play out their days so that Aiden has perspectives to jump into, all the side characters like maids and footmen that Aiden never inhabits but have plot relevance, other characters with this body-hopping power that also influence what happens to the eight characters during the day, all the clues, single lines of dialogue that mean different things depending on the person hearing them and the body inhabited…it’s absurd. I’m usually hesitant when books are unique or bend the limits but this? It’s Game of Thrones complex without the dragons and sex, from a writer’s standpoint, anyway.

Now, reading all that might make you nervous, but the beauty of a book like this is that the author, publisher, and book designer all know exactly what they’re dealing with. Mystery books have a lot going on (and this one, again, see above, is insane) so there’s a lot to learn. I steer away from fantasy and sci-fi novels for that reason, since there’s often so much frontloading of context, names, places, and worldbuilding that I’m overloaded at the beginning or bored because there’s no plot. Mysteries are centered in one location, with one premise, with a limited number of characters, though complex and interwoven. There are so many small design choices outside of the actual story that make this novel approachable without giving away too much.

It’s got a map — that’s fun, and helps us visualize the location. The chapters are separated by days to help us figure out what host we are and where that puts us in context. Clever! An active choice! Could be annoying to some because there’s no table of contents and you have to keep putting the book down and coming back to it (me)! But my favorite thing is the invitation at the beginning of the book. The invitation dictates every important character you’ll meet in the novel, at least the ones of status, with a quick descriptor of their job/reason for being invited. I had to reference this sheet multiple times throughout my reading to keep straight everyone’s names and roles, which could be a knock against the novel because you should be able to get everything you need from the prose itself (eye-roll). But I had something I could easily reference and reorient myself with, and I’d rather have an engaging story with supplemental resources than be intimidated by information and left feeling like I can’t keep up. Who wants to feel dumb? Who wants readers to feel dumb? Love it when designers get to do their thing. Love it when writing is functional.

Next time you read a book you like or see a cover, look for the designer/artist info and give them a little high-five in your head. They don’t get enough credit.

One of my main gripes I have with the book is the very thing that I praised earlier: the complication. This is not a transit read. This is not a book to pick up if you have obligations other than reading this book. The complication is intriguing, but at times, it can feel like it’s suffocating itself and therefore suffocating the reader. I will never damn a book for demanding attentive reading, interpretation, extra thought, and focus. I will, however, warn you against picking up this book if you don’t have a weekend solely dedicated to eating, sleeping, and reading. I found myself missing so many details and having to cycle back in order to understand where I was in the story, which ate into my reading time because while I’m fortunate enough to have time to read at all, I have a job that’s not reviewing books. I lost steam towards page 320, and with another 100+ to go, I found myself trudging along just to see how it all played out instead of being excited to learn the secrets that once gripped me. The book is complicated so it’s long, but I think we could’ve done with one fewer subplot to bring it back to something manageable. My sticky notes became less frequent, my notes less intense, and my attention lagging. I’m an avid mystery fan, but even I have some limits.

It baffled me completely when it became Sci-Fi.

The premise of a time-loop at all should’ve keyed me in earlier, but the extent to which knowing the reason we’re looping changed my attitude toward the events and ultimately left me feeling a little deflated. As it turns out, Blackheath Manor was once the real scene of an unsolved murder, that of Evelyn Hardcastle, that continues to remain unsolved. However, the version of which we stand in as Aiden is a complete technological fabrication, a simulation intended to rehabilitate prisoners and solve unsolved crimes of the past at the same time — a real two-for-one special. The other people guest-starring in bodies are vicious criminals, the titular Anna whom Aiden begins with being a political terrorist who murdered Aiden’s cop sister. The Blackheath simulation is reserved for the worst of the worst, and for some glossy reason, Aiden was allowed into the simulation as an innocent man to enact revenge on his sister’s killer. The whole time Aiden was hopping through bodies, the wardens of the simulation were manipulating the game to help Aiden escape and trap Anna inside forever.

This revelation was one straw too heavy for me. It turns Aiden into this absolute hero, altruistic in all of his goals, and the epitome of the good guy. Tutton frames it as ‘I did bad things too but look at me now’ since he went after Anna for the murder of his sister, but the way everything is concocted in his favor undercuts what could have been a conversation about morals, redemption, and what we do in an environment with no actual consequences. We like detective stories because the detectives are smart, not perfect or moral. Aiden is literally described as an innocent man whose only character trait seems to be believing Anna can change from being a terrorist to a good person and consistently “losing” himself in the hosts he’s embodied.

Ultimately, this book lands somewhere between a fun gothic mystery novel with an interesting device and a philosophy lecture in forgiveness and rehabilitation skinned like one. The clear moral message, the final reveal of Evelyn’s murderer, and the complete story feel…underwhelming. Everything is right in front of you, explained as clearly as a synopsis, with a successful escape and a dead conspirator. Complication is the root of this story: there’s always an ulterior motive, a hidden secret, something layered on something else to weave this incredibly thought-out plot.

TLDR: 3.5/5 Clearly well-loved and cared for by the author but the ending feels too neat to be satisfying. Beautiful atmosphere, interesting characters, and tropes are familiar but not boring. Intrigued. A little disappointed.