They live in the mind and works of Shakespeare, and one of them will soon die. Our cast is a group of college students, all studying theatre at a specialist arts academy. We then flash back to the year of that fateful murder. We begin with a man named Oliver, who has just been released from prison for a murder he didn’t commit. You can’t forget about it but you are encouraged not to look at it.

What sets this apart from other mystery novels is the fact that its mystery sits quietly at the back of the room. One of novels which stands at the summit of the dark academia genre, If We Were Villains is also an excellently crafted murder mystery story. Incredible work.īuy a copy here! If We Were Villains by M.L. Stuart Turton showed absurd and admirable confidence in writing such a mystery masterpiece as his debut novel.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a dizzying novel, masterfully crafted and thrilling at every turn. The next morning, he wakes up as a different person in the house, and it is then that he learns that he will continue to flit from body to body for eight days, tasked with solving and preventing the death of the titular Evelyn Hardcastle. The people there tell him he is their friend, and that he is a doctor.

He walks, and eventually arrives at a manor house. He is in a forest, shouting a name he doesn’t know, and he is alone. It is as though he has just woken up in his own body. We begin halfway through a word that has just left the mouth of our nameless, amnesia-stricken protagonist. There are countless mystery novels which present an answer which reveals a dozen new questions, but this puzzle box of a novel actually pays all of that off with aplomb. Few modern mystery novels lean as hard on the definition of “mystery” as The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle does.

Looking glass sound catriona ward