A review by emory
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Amazingly detailed and fleshed out mystery and setting, but the 4th dimension chess about Aiden interacting with himself in other bodies throughout the day kind of ruined it for me. I was expecting the day to reset and his other bodies to return to their natural course of action on the day each time he failed to solve the murder; while I don't want to fault a novel for not living up to what I expected, the mystery itself seemed to take a backseat to our narrator trying to puzzle out where to be and what information he already knows in other hosts' brains. Not to mention how many paradoxes he creates by changing the way he interacts with old hosts (and the amount of time he spends trying to do this and his nonsensical failures at it). We're withheld important clues more than once to make the reveal more dramatic, and we're meant to remember details mentioned once, but reminded over and over again of obvious information--such as why our narrator is scared of someone literally hunting him down--as if we'd have no idea. 

The appearance of a masked mystery character who showed up just to tell our narrator exactly what was going on got on my nerves as well. I wasn't particularly sold on the reason Aiden was at Blackheath anyway, but surely there was some better way to insert that idea and others into the plot besides having a character who constantly shows up to dump information at us?

Laundry list of annoyances aside, it's a great version of those classic sorts of "big house, high society, dirty secrets" mysteries. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Suicide, Fatphobia, Death, Murder, and Child death

Moderate: Rape

Minor: Animal death

One character our narrator inhabits is described as very fat, and while in this body the narrator never stops talking about how disgusting and shameful it is and how he can barely move. It is very oversold and strongly implied that

this character forcing a woman under half his age to marry him by bribing her family

is made more horrifying because he is fat. The narrator inhabits the body of a man who is a serial rapist (not spoiler tagging bc it is one of the first things he learns about the man). No attacks are shown or described graphically but other characters speak flippantly of the crimes.