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

He wakes up in the forest, disoriented.  But he doesn't have time to figure things out as he sees a fleeing figure and someone chasing the woman who is running for her life.  As he stumbles away, he realizes he doesn't even know who he is.  After running for help, he comes upon a huge country house and bursts in only to find that no one really believes him.  But he does get a name for who he is although it doesn't seem right.

As the day progresses, he finds out the rules.  This is the Hardcastle ancestral home and the daughter of the house will be murdered that night at a dinner and dance.  He needs to find out who will do the murder.  To do so, he will go from host to host, waking up as each of them until he manages to put the clues together.  He finally finds his name, Adrian Bishop, but Adrian's essence is not available as takes on the thoughts and emotions of each of his hosts.

What a collection of hosts they are.  There is the coward, the blackmailer, the rapist, the massively obese businessman, the lawyer, the policeman.  Each has a piece of the puzzle but can Adrian extract what each man knows and put it together?  Just to make things more difficult, there are those fighting him to be the first to uncover the mystery and there are those who would kill him to prevent him winning.  There are the Hardcastles, whose plan of a dinner and dance is less to celebrate their daughter than to remind her of the day her brother was killed years before, a death they blame on her.  There are those who profess to be his allies, but can he trust them?

Turton has written a debut mystery that is full of twists and turns.  The reader starts out as confused as Adrian and only slowly starts to understand what is going on as the clues he gets are given to them as well.  This serves to underscore the confusion Adrian experiences and the various explanations come to the reader as much as a surprise as they do to Adrian. Underneath the surface, the tension steadily mounts and the ending is climatic and unexpected.   This book is recommended for mystery readers.