Book Review: How To Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

Annie Adams is despairing of making a go of her writing career when she gets an unusual summons. Her Great Aunt Frances apparently wants her to come up from London to visit the village of Castle Knoll, where Frances has long made her home. Annie and her mother Laura have always been under the impression that Laura would be the sole beneficiary of wealthy, eccentric Frances’ will, but this summons hints at a recent change of heart on the older woman’s part.

Ever since Frances was seventeen, she’s believed that she would be murdered, after a fortune teller predicted that fate for her at a county fair. Nearly sixty years have passed since then, and Frances has kept her hometown hopping with her paranoia in the interim. Annie, having never met the woman, is unsure of exactly what she’s walking into as she prepares to finally meet her great aunt for the first time. The townsfolk seem to regard Frances as annoying but mostly harmless, which does little to prepare Annie for Frances actually being murdered shortly after Annie arrives in Castle Knoll.

Even worse, Annie is quickly pitted against Frances’ nephew, Saxon Gravesdown, in a race to figure out who killed Frances. According to Frances’ recently updated will, whoever brings the killer to justice first inherits everything. If, however, neither can solve the case within a week, Frances’ sprawling estate—including Annie and Laura’s London home, and the lands Frances administered for the benefit of the villagers—will be sold to property developers instead:

From a certain perspective, if I can’t solve this murder, Saxon is probably the next best choice. Perhaps I can make some kind of deal with him if he wins, and he’ll let us keep our house. I’m still determined to do the best I can, but it’s smart to consider all the possible outcomes. The property development company just sounds like a horrible way for this to end. And there it is–another stroke of Great Aunt Frances’ genius.

 

The whole town will give us whatever information they can, once they find out what will happen if we fail. Aside from the murderer, of course. But it’s extremely cunning. Great Aunt Frances really has forced everyone who ever doubted her to take her seriously now.

As Annie investigates, she discovers evidence that inextricably links Frances’ death to the disappearance of the older woman’s best friend almost sixty years before. Emily Sparrow had been beautiful, bright and perhaps not as good a friend to Frances and Rose, the other girl in their tightly knit circle, as she might have been. Much of this was due to the influence of Emily’s mother Fiona, whose abuse of her daughter was an open secret among the girls as they blossomed into young women. As Frances confides in her diary:

But after that, Emily’s games got darker and more intense. Not all at once, but gradually, and in a way that was thrilling at first. Our early teens passed with Emily inventing the best scary stories, and leading Rose and me in summoning ghosts or dabbling in made-up black magic. We spied on people in the village and gossiped together when we uncovered secrets that we knew were half-invented. But we never hurt anyone, and we never hurt ourselves.

 

“We can’t blame Fiona for everything Emily does,” Rose said. “She’s not here, making Emily’s choices.”

 

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I sometimes wonder whether Emily toys with us just to feel she has some control over her life, outside of Fiona’s reach. Or perhaps it’s a way of punishing us for knowing too much.”

Emily disappeared when the girls were eighteen. Many assumed that the headstrong young woman had simply gotten tired of her mother and life in Castle Knoll, and had taken off for more glamorous parts of the world. But Frances had always feared that Emily was dead, and never stopped trying to figure out what had happened to her. Could Frances have finally deduced Emily’s fate, and could that have caused someone to fulfill a prophecy made over a half a century earlier?

Annie must try to find out, navigating the present with its confounding characters, and the past with the help of Frances’ teenage diary. The stakes are high, and are only raised when Annie finds herself in the killer’s crosshairs. Will she be able to secure her family’s future, or will she be the next to die?

I can definitely see the comparisons between How To Solve Your Own Murder and the blockbuster movie Knives Out, as multiple heirs vie to solve a killing in order to inherit vast riches. And while I appreciated the narrative device of having chapters from Frances’ diary interspersed with Annie’s modern-day investigations, I felt oddly disconnected from most of the characters. Still, this was a clever enough puzzle that illustrates how any prophecy can be self-fulfilling given an adequate amount of time. Its bucolic English setting, moving back and forth between centuries, is also a big plus for fans of both the genre and milieu.