The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

🌟🌟🌟🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

"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...

This book was not exactly what I expected but exactly what I needed. I'm always on the hunt for a mystery/thriller that is unique and takes things in a direction that I'm  not expecting. I had heard that 7 and a half deaths had a sci-fi element to it which is another genre that I enjoy so this book really intrigued me. 
The author throws you right into the fray with no information beforehand whatsoever. I was as disoriented as the main character probably was waking up in the body of a party guest having no idea where he was or how he came to be there. There were periods in the book that were thrilling and left me yelling at characters to run or not to trust certain people in the book. It was interesting and kept my attention easily because I wanted to solve the mystery right along with the main Aiden. There were points in the book where the pacing off and seemed to slow down considerably which was extremely frustrating for me. The slow pacing seems to happen towards the middle of the book and picks back up by the end. Everything happens so quickly and answers to questions are delivered. If you aren't paying close attention you could easily miss something and have to go back and read passages again. 
Something that I both loved and hated was that I couldn't figure out who the murderer was until the author spells it out at the end of the book. I'm usually really good at it but the end result was confusing for me. The murder mystery is a bit hard to follow and I'm not sure that the author left the appropriate amount of breadcrumbs for readers to solve it. 
Some of the questions that I had that were not pertaining to the murder but the rest of the story as a whole were never answered and I am still left wondering how certain things came to be or why. 

I have to say that I did LOVE the twist in the story pertaining to Aiden. I thought that it was so devious and clever. I wish that the author would have delved into that aspect of the story even more or would write another book focusing on that aspect of the book. I understood the end result of Aiden's stake in the story but would have preferred it end a bit differently than it did.