The Man Who Died 7 Times

I absolutely adored this.

The Man Who Died Seven Times is Groundhog Day, mixed with equal parts Arrested Development, The Butterfly Effect and Agatha Christie.

This is a cozy, twisty-turny mystery, where young Hisataro occasionally gets thrown in a loop where he lives the same day 9 times, so after learning the rules, he uses this knowledge for quite childish selfish reasons like passing the entry test for a prestigious school.

After a particularly lively new years celebration, he enters the loop and finds that his somewhat estranged grandfather has been murdered.

The main meat of this is in the second act, as there is a lot of building at the start of the book, but once you know the ground rules it’s a book you can go back again, and again to!