Groundhog Day Meets Quantum Leap Meets Memento Meets …

Title: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Rating: 5 Stars

Fasten your seat belts.

On the surface, it’s a conventional murder mystery. Set in the interim period between the two world wars on a rundown estate in England, a woman (Evelyn Hardcastle) is killed at a party in front of guests. Whodunnit?

But wait.

The day of the murder is repeated indefinitely until the murder is solved. Apparently, the day has been rerun many thousands of times without a solution.

The person that is supposed to solve the murder occupies the body of someone at the estate. It’s a different body each day. One day he might be a butler, the next a wealthy banker, the next a spoiled cad, and so on. After eight days of repeating the day in different characters, all memories are wiped clean and the cycle repeats all over again with our protagonist (named Aidan Bishop) having no memory of any of it.

If that’s not complex enough, Bishop not only assumes the person’s body but actually the person’s personality. Therefore, when he’s in the body of the banker, his mind becomes analytical. When he’s in the body of the spoiled cad, he’s nearly overwhelmed by his lusts. He has to make use of the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the hosts that he occupies.

If that’s not complex enough, there are two other characters occupying bodies. Their memory only exists for a day, so each new day they start again fresh. Bishop has no idea what their motives are. They could be friend or foe, and at different times they appear both.

If that’s not complex enough, there is an omniscient character hanging around the fringes. Disguised as a plague doctor, he sometimes offers advice and criticism.

If that’s not complex enough, the first host that he occupies, Dr Sebastian Bell, has been struck on the head and is suffering from amnesia.

If that’s not complex enough, all of the eight days that Bishop lives seem to be occurring simultaneously. When one of his hosts fall asleep or is knocked unconscious, he leaps to the previous host that he was occupying, picking up where he left off. Since all of this is happening asynchronously, the time of day that he occupies each host is different. Therefore, things are constantly happening in the past or that will occur in the future that has an impact upon him that he’s desperately trying to figure out.

You got all of that, right? Picture a novel that has the setting of a decrepit Downton Abbey, jumping characters like Quantum Leap, a nonlinear narrative like Memento, and constantly repeating the same day like Groundhog Day. This might be a mystery that Borges might have written if he had a particularly strong pot of coffee.

Does it all work? I have no idea. I don’t see any obvious holes in the narrative, but anytime you mess with the past to change the future you’re pretty much guaranteeing any number of paradoxes. I can’t even imagine the byzantine diagrams that Turton had to maintain to keep all of the threads even semi coherent. Trying to keep track of it all made my head spin.

I can say that I’ve never read anything like it. That’s a good thing.