Review | The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

“How lost do you have to be to let the devil lead you home?”

GoodReads Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.

Spoilers ahead.

First published in February 2018, “The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle” is the debut novel of author Stuart Turton. The story follows Aiden Bishop, a man who wakes up in the body of different host reliving the same day over and over – the day Evelyn Hardcastle is murdered at Blackheath Manor. Always too late to save her, Aiden’s only escape is to solve the murder. But he’s not the only one trapped in Blackheath, and his competitors may just be capable of murder themselves.

I’m ashamed to say that I underestimated this book, but at the same time that underestimation helped give me such a raw experience with this book that I fell in love with it.

For clarity, I listened to the audiobook version of the novel on Audible. I can still talk about it the same way, but there will be moments I talk about the narrator as well because that man had a great voice.

I will start by admitting that this was another book that I was drawn in by the front cover. The original cover, at the time of writing this review, was a Great Gatsby-style cover. Gold lines, black background, and red decals with images of key items in the story. There are no characters on the front, there is no real detail. It’s a simple cover and it intrigued me. Thanks to that cover, I read the description available on GoodReads and realised that I’d come across another murder mystery. I don’t know how I keep doing it, but this one felt different. It had a sense of the Great Gatsby crossed with Groundhog Day and I was instantly intrigued. Unfortunately, not intrigued enough to order a physical copy of the book. I was nervous, didn’t want to take up more time that I could afford because it just seemed like a different kind of read for me. I don’t know how to explain it – it was everything I was looking for in a book and yet it felt like an outlier, something of a step forward in my choice of books. So I found the audiobook version, liked the little preview and used a credit to buy it.

Turton’s writing style was comfortable. It was very easy to get through during the early stages of the book. He wasn’t too descriptive or overbearing, he told the story through the eyes of Aiden Bishop but at first you don’t know that. The way the story gets set up is so intriguing – you are literally thrown into the loop at the same time as Aiden, though he starts the story in the body of a doctor named Sebastien Bell. He wakes in the middle of the woods, witnessing a crime in the distance. All this man can remember is the name Anna and he thinks he’s just seen her get murdered. You get to feel every nerve-wracking moment of this man as he tries to remember who he is, why he knows this name and why he’s out in the woods in the first place. You spend the first little section of the book getting comfortable with this man and his role in the world, then get suddenly thrown into a new person. The narration continues but it’s a new character, a new body, and the confusion begins to mount. Turton builds up the tension so magnificently, there are times you can’t even trust the narrator. He has no clue who he is and the only source of information you and he get is in the form of an anonymous man stalking the grounds in a plague doctor’s outfit. Until the moment you get told what’s happening, you have no clue – you are simply following this man who seems to jump from body to body with no explanation.

I really have to admire the way that Turton planned out this story. I can almost imagine a crime board with each host’s face and red strings connecting them through the timeline of events. The way that every little detail came to fruition, even the smallest things that you wouldn’t have thought would be important, it just blew my mind when something from chapter three popped up again later on in the book and made everything make sense.

That, combined with the voice over skills of Jot Davies, made this book so compelling. Davies really brought Turton’s words to life, creating a unique voice for each and every one of the characters you come across. He really sells each emotion the characters go through, particularly Aiden, and managed to keep the story from feeling stale the whole way through. The combination of Turton’s skilled writing and Davies’ brilliant VO was a work of genius.

There are other murder mysteries that I can work out the general idea of what’s going on pretty quickly. I was saying just the other day how “Every Heart a Doorway” has a pretty simple mystery woven into its plot, that it was enjoyable but very easy to guess. “Seven Deaths” is at the other end of the spectrum for me – it had an incredibly entertaining plot regardless of the mystery, but the mystery was so intricately designed, it webbed through each and every little nook and cranny it could fit into and became a character of its own. When I thought I had a plotline solved, a new detail from a new host would come in and throw my theory out the window.

I only took so long to get through this book because I didn’t want it to end. As intrigued as I was and as invested as I was in getting to the answer, I didn’t want the story to end. This was such an amazing book and I can’t wait to see what Turton comes up with next because this was a story that is going to stick with me for a long time.