Honest review based on an ARC provided by Edelweiss. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
It's brilliant! Slow to actually start, but it'll be even more slow to move on from this one now it's over.
Aiden Bishop has lost all his memories and now he has eight chances and eight lives to relive a day and find out who kills Evelyn Hardcastle. But he's not the only one playing the game, and the others might not be up to a fair play.
Such a simple summary, such a big mess! Stuart Turton had to have a lot of patience to make sure this would all work, because it's kind of a groundhog-day trope mixed with time travel because Bishop can interact with his future and past selves, plus the memory loss and there is also a body change for each of the days, mixed with a survival game, and don't forget there's an actual body to take you right back to the good old whodunit trope. Like, what? It's not that no one has ever imagined it; I don't think writers are willing to undertake such a project.
But until you grasp all this greatness, it took a little too long. I confess I considered dropping during the first quarter, because the initial voice, before Bishop learns more, was very dull, the typical male protagonist. And it's not the characters that will keep you going; even the main one admits the more he sees Evelyn, the less he'd be willing to save her if not for the first impression. At the same time, some other characters could have been more charismatic, push us to keep going until we got to the good part of the plot.
Of course, I didn't drop it, because I had to know what was going on. Another part of the fun was meeting Bishop's other hosts and them seeing his past selves around. In a way, it would sometimes remind me of playing The Sims for a long time and seeing around a Sim you used to control before.
The big deal is still the plot itself and how it evolves. I'd even say it wasn't until the very ending that I finally got what it all was about because everything you first see is a lie. Every little thing. There wasn't a thing I was suspicious of that didn't turn out to be one—as well as other things I never thought of, of course.
Still the conclusion wasn't that mindblowing for me. Without all the twists and turns, the big mystery wasn't so big. It made me wonder how they were able to build all that universe and not see who killed Evelyn Hardcastle. I think that's a big flaw that bothered me, because thinking so I noticed a lot of the story was for nothing.
Nevertheless, this is one of the good thrillers, a really good thriller. If you don't mind a book dragging in the beginning, I strongly recommend it.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
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