The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

In the great Venn diagram of life, this novel is slap in the middle of the sparsely populated overlap of Quantum Leap, Sapphire & Steel, and Agatha Christie. At the country house party from (quite possibly literally) Hell the hostess is due to die that night; our hero has to work out which of the utterly vile fellow guests did it. The complication is that our hero himself jumps from guest to guest throughout the day, mostly possessing them but also being affected by their innate characters, working with multiple himselves in parallel and also managing to get himself murdered several times too … And by ‘eck you have to concentrate. My typical reading pattern is a few chapters at least once a day, so usually sufficiently frequent to retain plot, but even so I was struggling. This would be a joyous challenge to film but I think it could be done. My quibble was that I didn’t quite buy the ease with which the murderer was working his way through the hero’s hosts without any non-loopers noticing, or the way he tended to roll over and accept it. I did like the way the different hosts make their own contributions: they may all be unspeakably ghastly people but they still have strengths and abilities that come in handy.