THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER.
"Gosford Park" meets "Groundhog Day" by way of Agatha Christie – the most inventive story you'll read this year.
Tonight, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed... again.
It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed.
But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden – one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party – can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot.
The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath...
SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, I PAPER, FINANCIAL TIMES AND DAILY TELEGRAPH.

Writing a review for this book is the most excruciating thing I’ve done in a long time, not because I disliked it, but for the fact that I have no idea how I’m feeling about the read. It has been days since I finished the last chapter and closed my kindle before going to bed, yet whenever I try to come up with a coherent thought about my feelings, I was greeted by a blur of shattered notions and unfinished concepts. Is it me, or is it the book? I don’t know, I might leave this review here and come back in 10 years to update the rating.

Okay, but what is all of this about?
To be honest, I’m still not sure what to say, especially what to bring up without spoiling. This is that kind of book where you get things along the way, but perhaps the best place to start is the beginning. Sebastian Bell wakes up in the woods, with a man at his feet and a women’s name on his lips – Anna. Except for his name isn’t Sebastian. He woke up with no recollection of who he is, where he is, or why is he there. The only thing he knows is Anna’s name, and that he definitely needs to leave the Blackheath. Namely, he is stuck in a time loop, the one that resets every day, and the only way to escape it is to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle. Only he is not alone – there are other hosts in the castle (one of them is Anna), and only one of them can leave Blackheath behind. Each day they are given another host, a person connected to the murder, so they have a chance of gathering the clues to solve the mystery.

I love the genre so much that, sometimes, I think I’d love everything that’s written with at least a drop of mystery, no matter how bad it was. This book has a heavily complex storyline and the world, building its puzzle around a big number of clues, details, and experiments with time travel (time loops). Turton’s intricate and compound storybuilding, shocking plot twists and completely out-of-nowhere bring the story to the verge of unbreakable tension that collapses in climax with a shower of surprises. Half of the time I didn’t even know what happened to me, the effect this book had was incomparable and unexplainable.
My mind, blown.


So, if it is such a well-written mystery, what makes the book not so good?
For starters, writing. This is one of the rare books that brought me to the verge of leaving it unfinished. I hated the writing, and I despised its pacing. There were times I thought I’d get a chronic headache if I kept reading, exhausting my mind to the point nothing else about the book mattered but the fact that it was so painful to read. No matter how good was the concept, the execution failed badly and that’s a big error, especially in the prospect of getting a reader interested in a book.

Now getting a little bit into the spoilery part (ending mostly):

Okay, so the thing that triggered me a pretty damn lot was that ending, for two reasons. First, already said above, that I was confused to the core of my being (which shouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but I was already so mentally exhausted from reading this book that I just wanted it to be over by that point, no matter how good the conclusion was). And the second, the plot twist with Anna being a terrorist that killed Aiden’s sister. See, that wouldn’t be the problem if in the end it wasn’t shown as something perfectly fine – Aiden forgiving her because he trusted her inside the STIMULATION. I am sorry, but the people they were before Blackheath are completely undeveloped and the characters were basically just objects for the plot. Nevertheless, the concept of a man making peace out with the woman who murdered his sister and who knows how many more people on a conclusion she had “changed” (he had known her for 7 days and she spent them in the bodies of 7 different people working on her own agenda), does not appeal to me. At all. It makes no sense.