The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2018)
★☆☆☆☆
Locked-room Quantum Leap murder mystery. A man entering Blackheath Manor with no memories of his previous self must navigate the same day through the perspectives of eight different guests to solve the crime.
It’s an awful experience to finish a 400+ page book and feel almost zero connection to anything that happened in it. If it were only for the banal reveals, general lack of character interiority, and taped-on frame story, my review might hover around 1.5-2 stars. But what cements the one star for me is the heavy bioessentialism throughout and specific distasteful choices around fatphobia and rapeyness. So here I go, writing my first review in five months (since my last one-star review).
We get dropped into the head of Aiden Bishop, who remembers nothing except the name “Anna.” From there, he must piece together who he is and what he’s doing at Blackheath Manor. This involves a lot of tropey English country estate shit, which I was absolutely here for. The kicker is that once the day is over, Aiden jumps into the body of a different guest and must navigate the day through their eyes, and will repeat the loop eight times in total. Time shenanigans ensue.
The book is slow to start, but some of the middle parts are intriguing as we learn more about the guests—particularly as Aiden connects with one of his future hosts—and a slasher villain known only as “the footman” chases Aiden through the house, attempting to slay his hosts’ bodies. I’m not the sort of person who tries to solve a murder mystery as I’m reading it, so I was content to receive the reveals, and the fruits of Aiden’s quantum machinations, as they occurred.
But I didn’t care about any of it? Nobody who’s stuck in the loop remembers it, so they never have a chance to develop. When Aiden wakes up in a new body he sets about understanding who he is by examining a mirror—to find he has “the face of a rascal” or “striking blue eyes [with] precious little wisdom behind them”—and by getting exposition dumps from the people around him (“The lake […] where my brother was murdered by Charlie Carver”). I always thought I preferred plot-driven books to character-driven ones, but this is a book where literally everything is plot, and I found I needed more to stand on.
The reveals, when they finally happen, are underwhelming at best.
I thought for a moment I might be reading a novelization of The Sexy Brutale, but it turns out the time-jumping characters have literally no relationship to the events of Blackheath Manor. The mysterious footman is just a paid asshole. Evelyn, the true villain of the book, is just a garden-variety sociopath. The whole place is… a prison! Gasp! Maybe the author’s attempts to say something about forgiveness and how people change would have held water if I had cared at all about Anna, but I can’t recall even a single instance in which she did something of her own agency. 🤔
If the Plague Doctor (who can’t divulge any of the above at the start because “rules,” i.e., “the author needs to keep readers wondering”) really wanted to put Aiden in the bodies of the people closest to Evelyn to solve her death, I can think of a few other women who would have been good candidates. But that wouldn’t do for Turton’s book, for the same bioessentialist reasons Aiden can apparently know how much wisdom is behind someone’s eyes. And if that weren’t bad enough, Turton spends paragraphs talking about how disgusting it is for Aiden to be in Ravencourt’s larger body, and makes us spend time in a rapist’s head as he (big surprise) does rapey things for what amounts to shock value. Throw in a scene where (as another host) Aiden kisses a random woman without consent.
Yeah, that’s gonna be one star from me.