Versions of a Murder

Brace yourself…there’s a lot going on in this book, in the best way. Heidi Quick is a junior doctor in an understaffed English hospital. It’s the 1970s, and it’s not easy being a woman in any realm, but a woman doctor treating male patients is beyond the pale for many. After Heidi is struck by a male patient, she’s relieved to be offered a ride home by her coworker Dr. Preston. When he insists on being let into her home, she has no polite way out, and is murdered by him. That would seem to be the end of Heidi, until the next day when she wakes up in exactly the same situation, has the same conversation with her coworker, and must try to create a different route through the day so she’s not re-murdered (now there’s a word that’s normally not necessary). Over and over it goes, with Heidi slowly suspecting that Dr. Preston is a serial killer and longing to fix one of the tries at the situation so that she can make someone believe what’s going on. There’s quite the twist in one of Heidi’s later tries at life versus Preston, and with that twist, the fascinating do-overs, and the well-fleshed-out characters who populate Heidi’s strange roller coaster, this is one of the best books I’ve read in ages. Comparisons to Groundhog Day are inevitable, but this is more akin to the best time-travel dramas, such as Elly Griffiths’s The Frozen People.—Henrietta Thornton