You have to have a little age on you to remember the TV show "Quantum Leap." For the benefit of those who weren't sitting in front of a TV in the 80s, the show was about a botched time travel experiment that doomed a young scientist to a lifetime of randomly inhabiting the bodies & lives of strangers.

In a similar vein, the "gimmick" of this novel is that Anthony Bishop has 8 days and 8 bodies (one body per day) to investigate the murder of heiress Evelyn Hardcastle. Each day he wakes up inhabiting the body of one of the folks gathered at a decaying English manor house on the 19th anniversary of an old murder - a shady doctor, a corpulent banker, a detestable playboy, a butler, an artist - and has 24hrs to use whatever insights are available to him in his current identity to move closer to the truth.

And for the first half of the novel, I was enjoying the novelty of Turton's approach. There's a lot of action, interesting characters, intriguing clues, and I enjoyed Bishop's gradual journey of self-discovery. The bits where he's trying to keep the personalities of his hosts from sublimating his own personality felt particularly promising.

However, as other reviewers have noted, things get complicated fast, because the action isn't actually happening over 8 days - rather, Anthony's reliving the same day 8 times over, each time inhabiting an *additional* body. So as he works his way through his hosts, he's increasingly interacting with his old hosts. This starts creating not just continuity issues (don't even try to keep track of the timeline - it's impossible), but believability issues, as author Turton increasingly relies on plot manipulation and magical realism to explain/justify mounting improbabilities. By the end of the novel, Anthony Bishop finds his answer, but the magical realism subplot has introduced so many new (ill-defined, inconsistent) elements that they undermine the anticipated satisfaction of the solution. Mostly I found myself thinking "I worked this hard to keep track of everything, and it turns out not to have mattered?"

Definitely not a bad book. The premise is refreshingly different, and I have a lot of admiration for Turton's creativity. I only wish that, having woven such a delightfully tangled web, Turton had found a more satisfying way to extricate himself from it. ( )

Way too complicated for my little brain to follow. Many moving & overlapping parts, and, ultimately, a resolution that is not only unsatisfying, but wholly unforeseeable which, in a murder mystery, is maddening.

I almost gave up on this book a half-dozen times. Now I only wish I hadn't started it in the first place. ( )

Odzyskałem pasję do czytania. Momentami lekko chaotyczne, ale niesamowicie wciągające ( )

Some readers will find Stuart Turton's "The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" too convoluted to grasp without intense concentration. The setting is Blackheath, a manor house in England, where a ball is being held by Lord Peter and Lady Helena Hardcastle, nineteen years after the tragic murder of their young son, Thomas. The hero, Aiden Bishop, about whom we know next to nothing, finds himself inhabiting a different "host" every day for eight days, but here's the catch: Á la "Groundhog Day," he is living the same day over and over again. Bishop's task is to deliver the solution to the question "Who murdered Evelyn Hardcastle?" to the Plague Doctor, a masked man who appears to call the shots at Blackheath. Aiden learns, to his horror, that if he does not provide the correct answer by the Plague Doctor's deadline, Bishop will remain trapped in Blackheath.

Turton vividly describes the depressing atmosphere of a crumbling mansion, "a melancholy pile… musty, thick with mildew and decay." It's a "ruin waiting on the mercy of a wrecking ball." The author also captures Aiden's discomfiture at having to take on the identities of such individuals as Dr. Sebastian Bell, a weak-willed coward who has lost his memory; Lord Ravencourt, a and morbidly obese banker with disgusting table manners; Jeremy Derby, a slimy predator; Roger Collins, a severely injured butler; and a police officer named Jim Rashton. Bishop turns amateur sleuth, snooping around various rooms, eavesdropping on conversations, trying to elicit gossip from whatever source he can, and looking for clues that will enable him figure out what is going on. We empathize with Bishop, and share his impatience as time passes and he becomes increasingly frustrated by his lack of progress.

The narrative is dizzying in its complexity, although Turton supplies a handy list of the men and women who figure prominently in the proceedings. As the book meanders along, we are desperate to reach the finale, but it feels as if it will take forever to get there. Does this novel have any underlying themes? Here are some possibilities: In spite of their advantages, the rich and entitled can be as immoral and corrupt as their less privileged counterparts; a craving for vengeance may lead to tragic consequences; it is not always obvious whom we can trust; and greed, animosity, and emotional instability can turn ordinary people into monsters. "The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" is a drawn-out mystery with a baffling and exasperating plot that one would need a carefully constructed spreadsheet to follow. ( )

This book frustrated me to no end! It's like a giant game of Clue mixed with Dante's inferno. That ending has to be the most frustrating ending I have read in years. Gah!

Evelyn Hardcastle Will be murdered at 11 PM. You alone are responsible for solving her murder. At least that is what you believe to be true. This book has more twists to it than forty five snakes writhing beneath a house. The multiple POVs will make your head spin so fast that you might think you've just gotten off a teacup ride with PARTICULARLY sadistic 6 year old at the wheel.

the world building snuck up on me. for the first fifty pages or so, I could have chucked this book and thought I wasn't missing a thing. after that it really picks up and it's all I could do to remember to sleep. This book will fuck you up. It is a standalone by the way. You have been warned. ( )