Stuart Turton. The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Sourcebooks, 2018.

I doubt if anyone has read a book quite like The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Imagine the game of Clue played like the film Groundhog Day with some Freaky Friday thrown in. That is The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in a nutshell.

Our narrator, like the Bill Murray character in Groundhog Day, is doomed to relive a day in his life eight times. However, in each case he lives it in the body—and to some degree, the mind—of one of the other characters in the story. The characters have all been invited to a party at the rundown estate of Lord and Lady Hardcastle. The Hardcastles have a son, Michael, and a daughter, Evelyn. A third son, Thomas was murdered at the age of nine on the property. Lady Hardcastle is hosting the party on the nineteenth anniversary of his death. Most guests and, I suspect, most readers consider this macabre if not simply weird.

From all accounts, she never got over it. Shortly after Thomas’s death, she sent Evelyn away to a boarding school in France and has hardly seen her since. Michael has kept in touch with her and seems to stick up for her, but he seldom sees her, either.

Our narrator in turns reappears as a doctor, a servant, a playboy, a gourmand, a lawyer, a constable, and a young aristocrat. There are also a couple of otherworldly folks. At least one man dresses as a plague doctor; in other words, he wears a mask with a beaklike nose that one sees in medieval portrayals of doctors attending to plague victims. He appears from time to time to tell the narrator what he must do. He acts as a kind of referee or observer from outside.

There is also the footman. As in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the footman here is not so much a servant as an antagonist representing death. Our narrator’s challenge (we learn a name for him eventually) is to solve or, if possible, prevent the murder of Evelyn which is supposed to happen in the evening of the get-together—and which does happen on some of the days. At the same time, he and some of the others must escape the footman.

There a numerous other men and women at the manor. They interact with each other as well as with the various men our narrator inhabits. There is at least one other doctor and two other attorneys. There is Stanwin, a blackmailer who seems to have something on everyone there.

Because of what happens to our narrator, there are mysteries nesting within each other. Yes, there is the apparent murder of Miss Evelyn (if it cannot be stopped). But there are also questions about what exactly happened to young Thomas nineteen years before—and what happened to the stable boy two weeks before that. The stable boy was just a year or two older than Thomas.

There are also mysteries about what people are up to now. Who are the plague doctor and the footman? Why do some people like some guests and hate others? It looks like after early morning some of the folks including Lady Hardcastle have disappeared. In such a party setting, some things get complicated because of booze. One of the doctors is a British version of Dr. Feelgood and brings a stash of drugs to the party. As in Clue, there are also a number of weapons or potential weapons that may play a part in the story.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is quite clever. Each of the eight men our narrator inhabits has a very different personality and physique. The narrator has his own as well. The story is not told in a completely linear manner. While most of the days play out numerically one through eight, we do get some chapters that take us back to an earlier day.

And there are also episodes that would be typical of any party, especially a party in which many of the guests were staying over. There are various maids and servants. People flirt. People argue. People gossip. And what about the people who seem to be missing or who were invited and have not come?

Not only is the novel clever. It is complicated.

There were a few times that I wished it had a list of characters the way plays and some Russian novels do. Still, I think I got everyone straight. Because it turns out that the mystery of Evelyn is not the only one, I doubt if anyone could solve all the mysteries. Every chapter, every repeated day contains revelations. This not so much a mystery to solve (like Clue) but a party game to just get caught up in and carried along.