Murder me once, shame on you, murder me 84 times… Vivian Dies Again by C.E. Hulse #bookreview #VivianDiesAgain #NetGalley

Vivian Slade is a cautionary tale. The wrong side of thirty, she’s no longer the life and soul of the party – she’s a party of one. But she’s determined to turn over a new leaf, even if that means going to a family gathering where everyone hates her. Turns out, someone really hates her – enough to push her off a balcony to a very messy end. But then Vivian wakes up! Only to be murdered again. And again. Stuck in a baffling time loop, Vivian’s only ally is a sleep-deprived waiter who just wants to finish his shift. Will Vivian be able to solve her own murder? Only time will tell…

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Hi and welcome to my review of Vivian Dies Again!

Truth be told, Vivian Dies Again and I got off on the wrong foot. 70 or so pages in, I had to turn back to the synopsis and remind myself why I’d wanted to read it so badly. If I were that person, I might have thrown in the towel there and then. But I’m not, so I kept at it and before long, I was actually glad I’d been too stubborn to quit.

What went wrong? For starters, I didn’t like Viv. Like, at all. I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to? But in any case, I found it very difficult to spend all this time with this person I came to dislike more the more I knew about her. (Acting like a brat and getting wasted at every turn was bad enough, but an affair with a married man, really? Ugh. No offence, but at 36, one should probably know better.) I just wanted to shout at her to get her head and her life sorted, and then walk away. 

Moreover, while I get that the scene needed to be set, and that we need to get a feel for the family dynamics, that first quarter of the story was all about how dysfunctional Viv and her extended family are and it was just too much family drama for me. I love me a bit of bookish family drama but there has to be more to the plot than that.

Fortunately, my reading experience did a full one-eighty when Viv finally died! On-page, that is, cos apparently, she did die 80-something times before, but we never even knew. The mystery of what was happening and who would want to kill her (cos no, I didn’t like her either, but murder seemed like overkill – bad pun intended) well and truly got to me and I was hooked for the remainder of the book.

Once I got over that first hurdle, I had a really great time with Vivian Dies Again. I didn’t find it as dark or as funny as the quotes on the blurb suggest (I didn’t expect laugh-out-loud funny, but a few grins and a snort would have been nice), but the mystery saved the day for me, and by the end, I had really come to appreciate Viv’s character arc, and her mum’s as well.

Vivian Dies Again is out in digital formats and hardcover on 29 January.

Massive thanks to Viper Books and NetGalley for the DRC. All opinions are my own.