“The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle” is a mystery novel from 2018 by Stuart Turton.
My Thoughts
Well, yikes. The premise of this book sounded incredibly exciting, which is why I bought it at my local bookstore. But heavens, it was a complicated, confusing ride. I wanted to like this book so much, but I couldn’t. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all. Therefore, it took me three tries to finish this book.
The book’s premise reminded me of “Groundhog Day”, only in a bad way. A man tries to solve the murder of “Evelyn Hardcastle” by waking up in different bodies for seven days. But that’s not all. He also switches back and forth between people and days within the book. And if that wasn’t enough, there are what feels like 20 other people introduced. After a third, I was already so confused that I wondered how someone could write over 500 pages about this story. Obviously, I was not mentally invested enough to follow the plot.
Nevertheless, I finished it. But the ending also disappointed me a bit. Maybe it was because I already had a negative attitude towards this book.
To be honest, I feel bad for rating this book so low. Because you can feel how much time must have gone into working out these twists. But I can’t change that this book wasn’t made for me.
My rating for ‘The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle’
I’m sorry, this wasn’t it for me.
About the author
Stuart Turton is a British freelance travel and technology journalist.
He made his book debut with “The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle”, for which he won several awards.
