2018 mystery with science-fictional elements. A man wakes up in
mid-shout with no memories, in the grounds of a decaying country house
during a weekend party, nineteen years after the young son of the
house was murdered. And someone is going to be murdered now. US vt
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.
This is a book of discovery; I suspect I'll enjoy reading it
again and putting the pieces together, but I also enjoyed the game of
working out what was going on. Therefore I'm not going to talk about
the actual plot in more than superficial detail. (The back cover of
the book gives more away than I will. I was glad to have avoided even
that much.)
But there's clearly a great deal of influence from Christie here, as
everyone has their secrets, and multiple plots interlock – not, as so
many writers have done, on the single sin principle, where once you
know a man is an adulterer you know that that will be the reason for
all his inconsistencies and he can't also be the murderer, but rather
keeping everyone relevant even as more complications arrive. (There's
a dram. pers. at the start and I didn't feel any need to take further
notes, but there's certainly rather more going on here than in the
standard mystery.)
And, almost but not quite separated from that, there's the question of
just what's going on, who our narrator is, and why he's there, in
rather more than the basic practical sense.
If you enjoy classic murder mysteries, and even more so if you enjoy
the sort of modern writer who likes to play with them but has a
respect and liking for the form rather than merely wanting to
deconstruct it (James Anderson's Inspector Wilkins series comes to
mind), I can thoroughly recommend this. It most certainly does not
abide strictly by the rules; but it never leaves the reader
floundering. It's even possible to work out what's going on before the
big revelation.
I might have liked a bit more of a conclusion, and one character's
fatness is rather poorly handled, but those are really the only faults
I can find here.
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