Spoilers!
Enduring our worst choices and mistakes on an seemingly endless loop is another way of describing memory, but it’s also great fodder for a fiction story. Stuart Turton’s 2018 debut book, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, is a mash-up of Agatha Christie and science fiction, murder-mystery meets body-hopping Groundhog Day. All of which is set in the fun backdrop of high society Britain at the Blackheath mansion with a wide array of characters and motives. Turton’s book is clever, continuously layered onion with no object permanence that makes for a captivating game of whodunit.
The reason an assortment of people have been gathered at the Blackheath mansion is because they’ve been invited by the owners, Lord Peter and Helena Hardcastle, for a masquerade ball. Weirdly, the ball is being held on the 19-year anniversary of their son, Thomas’, brutal murder, for which in the invitation, they specify nobody ought to discuss. Weirder still, is that everyone invited was also at Blackheath 19 years ago when Thomas was murdered. What an appropriately peculiar and macabre premise for a gathering and the forthcoming whodunit. And so is the concept of a masquerade. After all, we all wear masks, and our protagonist will have to go through a succession of masks to reveal the truth before him.
Since I go into books completely blind, I was having fun with the amnesia-like beginning with Dr. Sebastian Bell, who wakes up in the forest on the Blackheath estate, not knowing his name yet, how he came to be in the forest, and what’s going on. He only knows that his arm is cut up in defensive wounds indicating someone attacked him, and that seemingly, a man in the forest murdered a woman he thinks is named Anna. Eventually, he stumbles to the mansion proper and learns his name from Daniel Coleridge, a professional gambler. Michael Hardcastle assures Bell they will search for the allegedly murdered woman. Then, later, when Bell opens a box left in his room to find a dead rabbit with an ominous note from “the footman,” he faints. Instead of waking up as Bell, he wakes up as … Roger Collins, the butler. What is going on?! That was a jaw-dropping twist and thrust the story into an entirely different genre and orientation.
The person body-hopping around is Aiden Bishop. There’s someone he’s taken to calling the Plague Doctor, on account of his attire and mask, who explains the “rules” going on. Aiden is essentially trapped in a purgatory loop, where he’s been tasked with solving the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle. If he solves it, he is set free from the loop. The other advantage he has, thanks to the Plague Doctor, is he has eight “hosts” he’s able to embody to uncover the murder plot. When the current “host” he occupies goes to sleep, dies, or in Bell’s case, faints, he either goes back to a previous “host” or the next in line (the Plague Doctor was very intentional about the order). Each “host” has some sort of talent or personality affect or perspective that is helpful to that end. They include Dr. Bell, the drug peddler; Collins, the butler; Donald Davies, a socialite; Lord Cecil Ravencourt, a banker; Jonathan Derby, another socialist (who is also a rapist); Edward Dance, a solicitor for the Hardcastle family; Jim Rashton, a police constable (the most important “host” in my estimation); and Gregory Gold, the artist in residence. But there are also “rivals” who are also trying to solve the murder to be freed from the loop. Only one person can be freed from the loop, so, the others could necessarily be devious in thwarting the efforts of their rivals, up to and including murder. The two rivals seem to be the original embodiment of Daniel Coleridge, who has the help of someone in the same league as the Plague Doctor named Silver Tear, both of whom answer to their “superiors,” and Anna, who Bell thought was being murdered. Those two, unlike Aiden, do not have the benefit of hopping through multiple hosts and maintaining their memories; their day starts anew each time. Finally, there is the aforementioned “footman” who for whatever reason, is intent upon killing every host that Aiden occupies, as well as Anna. Supposedly, this loop has happened thousands of times across decades, which has allowed the Plague Doctor to fine-tune his approach to helping Aiden.
The first time Aiden witnesses Evelyn’s death, it actually looks like a suicide. Before her 11 p.m. death, she is betrothed to Ravencourt, who is old, but rich, and we later learn it’s because her parents are going bankrupt and marriage with Ravencourt will save their fortune. After the announcement of their looming marriage, she runs out of the masquerade ball and ends up at the lake on the estate where her brother, Thomas, was murdered. At which point, she seemingly shoots herself in the stomach and dies. Is the answer to who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, then … Evelyn Hardcastle?! That would be too easy, of course.
What Aiden learns after going through all eight bodies, some of which are killed by the footman, is that Evelyn is the one who killed Thomas because Thomas witnessed or at least questioned why she was in the caves where she left a servant boy to die. And why did she do that? She’s a sociopath, I suppose. However, when Helena and her secret lover (and Evelyn, Thomas, and Michael’s actual father) come upon the scene, the secret lover convinces everyone that it was an accident and he takes the blame for Thomas’ death. Evelyn is “shipped off” to Paris and nobody sees her for 19 years. That enables her to come back to Blackheath in the guise of Madeline Aubert, the maid to Evelyn, with “Evelyn” being played by a con artist she and her brother paid for. The new scheme is to fake her death to get out of the marriage to Ravencourt, and somehow she and Michael stand to profit from it. In the run-up to the fake death, Evelyn kills both her parents and Millicent Derby, mother of Jonathan Derby, who was the only one to recognize Madeline as Evelyn. (Millicent protected her rapist son; Turton has a great line about it, stating, “Whatever darkness lurks inside Jonathan Derby, Millicent tucked it in at night.” Oof.)
However, because of Aiden and Anna figuring all of this out, they are able to thwart the scheme. But Aiden doesn’t want to just free himself. He wants to break the rules and free Anna as well. This despite Aiden learning from the Plague Doctor that everyone at Blackheath is there for some crime against humanity, hence the looping punishment. That includes Anna. The reason the Plague Doctor felt compelled to help Aiden is that he, on the other hand, chose to come to Blackheath to … kill Anna! Anna apparently brutally tortured and killed his sister. But now, all these “years” later, Aiden thinks Anna has changed and that Blackheath, ostensibly also functioning as a rehabilitation loop, has fulfilled its purpose with her. So, who killed Evelyn Hardcastle? The fake Evelyn Hardcastle before the real one could dispatch Aiden and Anna.
I had two questions at the end of the book. First, was any of it real? That is, did the Hardcastle family exist, with all the tragedy that befell them over the course of these 19 years, along with the secondary characters? Or was it all a figment for the purposes of purgatory, punishment, and rehabilitation through the loop? Or somehow both? In that way, those events did happen, but years later, everyone is reliving it for the purposes of the loop? Second, is anyone actually dying at the hands of the footman, Evelyn, or others? Or only within those specific loops and then they’ll be alive in the next loop? I’m leaning toward the latter because at one point, Coleridge kills Ted Stanwin in cold blood, but rationalizes it to Aiden as he’ll be “alive” the next day (the next loop).
Time travel stories are always, well, loopy, pun intended, and add in body-hopping, and it gets especially loopy. As confounding as it is, it’s a blast, particularly with a murder to solve at the heart of it. That “onion” I mentioned at the top was quite clever in that Evelyn appeared to be committing suicide, and then appeared to be faking her death, and then it wasn’t even the real Evelyn at all! I look forward to reading Turton’s next book if this is debut. What an audacious and ambitious book to announce your talents to the world with. The best part is, I didn’t even intend to buy this book per se; I meant to buy Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book published the year prior, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and thought this was that. Regardless of how I came to it, though, Turton’s book was a good time.
Milam's Musings 