The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

The premise of this book – a historical mystery where one man relives each day in the body of a different person, with no memory of who he actually is, and must solve a murder before all of his “bodies” are expended – is fascinating. I love a good locked room mystery, which this one is, and I love it even more when it’s set in the past. The time repeating and body swapping conceits add interest, and Turton develops intriguing rules for both as the story progresses.

Unfortunately, the book fell short for me in two primary ways. First, the audiobook narrator simply cannot do female voices. This is a common pitfall for male narrators, and like many of his fellow men, narrator Jot Davies pitches the female characters’ voices unnaturally high and shrill in this book. Any sort of inflection indicating emotion or meaning is completely obscured to the point of not really even being attempted; the only feature of women’s voices as done by Davies is “high.” There’s only one main female character in the book, but as she’s the titular character and her relationships with the protagonist in all of his guises are of paramount importance, it makes for a very difficult listen.

Secondly, one of the people the protagonist inhabits is fat. Turton, through his protagonist, makes much mention of this fact. No one seems to much like this person when the protagonist isn’t controlling him, and his fatness seems to be the reason. Everyone around him (and within him) sees his fatness as a personal failure, something that goes hand in hand with – is both the cause and effect of – his laziness, rudeness, arrogance, and overall unlikability. This is no passing characterization; it’s brought up over and over, the protagonist’s disgust at inhabiting a fat body made apparent repeatedly. While I may have been able to get past the annoying female voicing, I stopped enjoying the book completely at this point and decided to give up.

 

The Witch Elm by Tana French

This is a book that I think is actually objectively pretty good but I just didn’t particularly enjoy. It is S L O W. It took eight hours to get to the actual mystery; everything before that read like a slice of life novel about a generic Irish man named Toby who is not particularly likeable but also not particularly terrible either. He gets involved in an unethical thing at work, he’s in love with his girlfriend who is clearly too good for him, he argues about privilege with his friends at a bar, and he experiences a break-in at his home where he’s brutally beaten. He survives, but he has a long road to recovery ahead of him. After that, he decides to visit his dying uncle at the home he and his cousins visited during summers when they were kids, needing some time to get accustomed to the ways his life has changed after the attack and wanting to help care for a beloved family member in his final days. At this point, there were several more chapters of Toby caring for said uncle, reminiscing with him and his cousins, and so on. This could have been a novel about how a fairly self-centered man learns to care more about others in the wake of his own personal trials, and it would have been a good example of that – just not really what I was looking for.

Eight hours in, though, the mystery finally starts to show itself. One of his cousin’s kids discovers a skull in the old tree on the grounds (the witch elm of the title), and it turns out that it belongs to a classmate of Toby’s who disappeared when they were kids. Murder is clearly how he died – but who is the culprit? I listened for a bit longer, glad to have finally gotten to the good part (as I saw it), but the glacial pace continued and I stopped caring. Ultimately, I let my digital checkout expire, read the ending on Goodreads, and moved on.