Stuart Turton

Stuart Turton is a British author whose debut novel The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle reinvented the locked-room mystery with a wildly inventive structural conceit.

Stuart Turton arrived on the crime fiction scene fully formed with The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a novel that takes the classic country-house murder mystery and subjects it to a Groundhog Day twist: the protagonist must relive the same day eight times, each time occupying a different guest’s body, in order to identify the killer before the cycle resets. The premise sounds gimmicky but the execution is genuinely impressive — Turton manages the considerable logistical challenge of keeping multiple timelines coherent while maintaining genuine suspense and delivering a satisfying solution.

The book wears its influences proudly: it loves Agatha Christie, it loves the staginess of golden-age detective fiction, and it knows that the pleasure of the locked-room mystery lies partly in the artificiality of the puzzle. Turton embraces that artificiality and pushes it to an extreme. Some readers find the complexity a little exhausting by the final third, and the emotional stakes are lighter than in literary crime fiction — character depth occasionally gives way to the demands of the plot machinery. But as an exercise in puzzle construction, it is remarkable.

Turton is a writer of real invention, and The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle marks him as one of the more exciting new voices in British crime fiction. Readers who enjoy their mysteries as intricate games will find the novel enormously satisfying.