Review of How to Solve Your Own Murder

More About How To Solve Your Own Murder

For fans of Knives Out and The Thursday Murder Club, How to Solve Your Own Murder is an enormously fun mystery about a woman who spends her entire life trying to prevent her foretold murder only to be proven right sixty years later, when she is found dead in her sprawling country estate.... Now it's up to her great-niece to catch the killer.

It’s 1965 and teenage Frances Adams is at an English country fair with her two best friends. But Frances’s night takes a hairpin turn when a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. Frances spends a lifetime trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet, compiling dirt on every person who crosses her path in an effort to prevent her own demise. For decades, no one takes Frances seriously, until nearly sixty years later, when Frances is found murdered, like she always said she would be.

In the present day, Annie Adams has been summoned to a meeting at the sprawling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great-aunt Frances. But by the time Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, Frances is already dead. Annie is determined to catch the killer, but thanks to Frances’s lifelong habit of digging up secrets and lies, it seems every endearing and eccentric villager might just have a motive for her murder. Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Castle Knoll, or will dredging up the past throw her into the path of a killer?

 As Annie gets closer to the truth, and closer to the danger, she starts to fear she might inherit her aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.

More About Kristen Perrin

Kristen Perrin is originally from Seattle, Washington, where she spent several years working as a bookseller before immigrating to the UK to do a Masters and PhD.

She loves working on projects that have a mystery at their heart, and splits her time writing cosy crime for adults and working on middle grade books that mix magic and adventure. Her children’s series, Attie and the Worldbreakers, is currently available in Dutch, German, and Polish.

She lives with her family in Surrey, where she can be found stomping in the mud with her two kids, collecting too many plants, and painting and sketching in her spare time.

Thoughts About How to Solve Your Own Murder

Normally, I find myself annoyed by stories following two timelines...the "three people lived in this house and here are their stories from 1920, 1960 and the present day." Don't ask me why, I don't know. But How to Solve Your Own Murder has two timelines and I loved it! Perhaps, it's because the characters in both timelines are so interwoven with each other - some characters are in both timelines and those that are only in one timeline are usually related to someone in the other timeline. Because if that, it truly feels like one united story.

Annie Adams ends up trying to solve two murders six decades apart that happened to people from the same small English village. (Or was it a disappearance and a murder or a murder and a natural death or a murder and a suicide? At various times I was leaning toward each of these theories.) With the help of some old diaries and villagers memories, Annie tries to piece together what happened in the 1960s and decide if it is connected to the present murder. The trouble is, no one seems to be telling the truth...or at least not the whole truth. Lots of secrets in small villages!

I enjoyed the portrayal of the friendships between the three girls in the 1960s: Frances, Emily and Rose. They were multi-faceted and my opinion of them evolved as I read the book and learned more tidbits about each teenager. They felt like real people. You thought you knew exactly who they were and then something new would be uncovered to make you think...hmmm, was I wrong? Shifting between the two time periods (the 1960s story is told mainly through diaries) really kept the story moving along, I didn't want to stop reading because I needed more and more clues. This was a definite pageturner.

A Little Extra

Annie Adams and the folks of Castle Knoll are back! How to Seal Your Own Fate was just released on April 29. And one of the keys characters is Archie the gardener who I love! I haven't read it yet but here's a quick summary:

Present day: Annie Adams is just settling into life in Castle Knoll when local fortune teller Peony Lane crosses her path and shares a cryptic message. When Peony Lane is found dead only hours later inside the locked Gravesdown Estate, Annie quickly realizes that someone is out to make her look guilty while silencing Peony at the same time. Annie has no choice but to delve into the dark secrets of Castle Knoll in order to find out just what Peony Lane was trying to warn her about, before the new life she’s just begun to build comes crashing down around her.

1967: A year has passed since her friend Emily disappeared, and teenage Frances Adams finds herself caught between two men. Ford Gravesdown is one of the only remaining members of a family known for its wealth and dubious uses of power. Archie Foyle is a local who can’t hold down a job and lives above the village pub. But when Frances teams up with Archie to investigate the car crash that claimed the lives of Ford's family, it quickly becomes clear that this was no accident—hints of cover-ups, lies, and betrayals abound. The question is, just how far does the blackness creep through the heart of Castle Knoll? When Frances uncovers secrets kept by both Ford and Archie, she starts to wonder: What exactly has she gotten herself into?