gervase_fen | Disordered Daggers : The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (2018) (Reply)

Stuart Turton's accomplished debut novel is a Golden Age detective story as scripted by Steven Moffat or Charlie Brooker ; it's Quantum Leap mashed up with Cluedo, Inception remixed with Agatha Christie. Groundhog Day set in Gosford Park. These are all things I like very much indeed. I liked this novel very much indeed.

Our narrator wakes up alone in the middle of a forest outside the crumbling stately pile of Blackheath ; it's some time between the First and Second World War and he's on the guest list of a masquerade ball. Except he can't remember who he is. He thinks he hears a girl being murdered somewhere out of sight in the trees ; when he gets to the house he finds out that he is Sebastian Bell, a doctor, except he isn't. Bell is a host, one of eight, for the mind of Aiden Bishop, who will relive each day in different bodies until he can uncover the murderer of the bride to be, Evelyn Hardcastle. The murder is a fixed point in the evening - can he change the events leading up to it? Or is he fated to be killed by a murderous footman each time?

(Here's a spoilery quotation from late in the novel which reveals some Doctor Who DNA :

"This is forbidden, Josephine, " says the Plague Doctor, shocked. "We do not take direct action. We do not give orders. We certainly don't feed them information they aren't supposed to know. You're breaking every rule we've promised to uphold.")

I can readily believe this took Stuart Turton three years to write : it's ingenious, dazzling, intricate and mind-bending. I loved it.