The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Plot Summary

At a party thrown by her parents, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed – again.

Aiden Bishop has eight days and eight bodies to solve a murder. To be more specific, he has one day eight times. Seeing each day through new eyes would be disorientating enough, but there are dark forces at work in Blackheath. Forces that don’t want him to solve this mystery, and win the reward: freedom.

My thoughts on The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is Stuart Turton’s first novel. And what a novel it is! In case you didn’t think the murder-mystery genre had enough to untangle, try mixing it with time travel and body swaps.

The book has a very cool premise, I can’t deny that! Our protagonist wakes up at first with no idea who he is or what he’s doing. Over the course of the book he discovers that his job is to solve Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder. Eventually he also learns his real name, Aiden Bishop. What he doesn’t learn, for the longest time, is how he ended up in this mess. The mechanics are made clear to him: he will wake up each morning in a new host, and he has the whole of the day (unless the host dies and barring any time that they spend asleep/unconscious before midnight) to gather as much information as he can about Evelyn’s death. An incredibly idea! Although the premise comes with downsides, which I’ll address later.

The writing had quite a poetic feel without coming across as too much. I found myself admiring a turn of phrase on almost every other page. I also thought Turton did a nice job with Aiden’s perspective shifting in his different hosts. Obviously, he feels physically different – taller, older, heavier – depending on whose body he’s inhabiting. He also sees different things, depending on the personalities and areas of interest of the people whose eyes he’s seeing through. I thought that was a great touch, and made the multiple hosts thing feel like an integral plot element rather than a gimmick.

The premise comes with issues

The way information is revealed throughout The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was frequently very irritating, and felt contrived more often than not. The Plague Doctor, Anna, other characters and hosts – everybody seems to delight in hinting at information without coming out and saying anything useful.

This was always going to be an issue though. In any story with this kind of metaphysical weirdness, there’s the question of who or what is behind it. The author has to decide whether to explain that or not, and to what extent. In Turton’s book we’ve got a character Bishop calls the Plague Doctor, who shows up with some clarification at some points. But the way he doles out that clarification feels extremely arbitrary, and it wound me up

 One of the first times Bishop tries to ask him what’s going on, the Plague Doctor gives a response to the effect of, “Eh, who know? Maybe eternity is boring.” As the book goes on you get more and more information doled out, but as soon as we had this conversation, I knew it was going to annoy me. When you have a character who apparently knows everything, but drops these little snippets of information at what they’ve decided is the right time, I just want to shake them.

When the success of your plot depends on the know-all character telling the main character just enough at specific moments, it feels so contrived. I think Turton did as well with this as he could, given the type of story it is. But it was never going to be a favourite of mine once we had that dynamic in play.

Other stories handle a similar problem differently to The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

It reminds me a little of The Opposite of Always (Justin A. Reynolds) or Dark Matter (Blake Crouch), which had similarities. Both of those books had something time-bendy going on, although the authors dealt with it very differently.

In The Opposite of Always, Reynolds just didn’t address the why behind the time loop. I would have liked some kind of explanation, but I like the complete absence better than the pieced-out explanation we got in Seven Deaths. In Dark Matter, the whole thing is very scientific, which can be hit or miss. But the sci-fi genre has room for those kinds of space-and-time shenanigans without it being something a mysterious external force has put in place because… reasons?

Ultimately, I think part of my frustration was that, once I realised there was ‘a reason’ for the loop in The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, I was pretty sure the reason was going to be a let-down. And that put a damper on the rest of the book for me.

Other thoughts

The characters were interesting, for the most part. They were varied, and it was surprisingly easy to keep them all straight in my head. Particularly considering it was a substantial cast of characters. Some of the characterisations felt very surface-level, even in Aiden’s different hosts. But I think that might be a side effect of how many characters there are. Evelyn was interesting—she wasn’t always that present, but she’s obviously integral to the plot. You see a lot of different sides of her, even if just in flashes, throughout the story.

Also, this is a pretty small thing in the scheme of things, but you find out reasonably early that this whole thing can be – and has been – reset if it doesn’t go ‘right’. And the stakes don’t feel that high once you know this has been ongoing for years upon years. Even when you know that other people are working against Aiden (which is also information you get pretty early), it just doesn’t feel like that big a deal. If he doesn’t manage to do what he’s trying to do, it sounds like he’ll just get another shot, and another, and another…

It’s confusing, in the way that time-travel stories so often are. It’s clever, but also confusing. There were a couple of moments where something happened which I couldn’t remember being set up earlier. I suspect I’d find clues to those things, if I was invested enough to go back and check. I was happy to just let it stand though.

Wrap-up

This book is a body-hopping, time-travelling murder mystery, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day in a bewildering and breathtakingly ambitious novel. While I had some major frustrations with the story, the writing was great. Murder mystery fans wanting a new take on the genre should check out The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle!