Review: How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

 

How to Solve Your Own Murder (Castle Knoll Files #1) by Kristen Perrin

Publication Date: March 26th 2024 by Dutton

Pages: 368

Source: Publisher

Rating: ★★★★½

Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Goodreads

My Thoughts:

Annie Adams has been summoned to the small village of Castle Knoll by her wealthy Great Aunt Frances for a meeting, but when she gets there her Great Aunt is found murdered. Annie discovers that Aunt Frances had believed she’d be murdered when a fortune teller predicted it back when she was seventeen years old. Frances kept diaries and even a murder board with theories of her own murder, and of her friend Emily’s disappearance. Annie is drawn into both mysteries, unraveling the past through Aunt France’s diaries and by talking to the players still living in Castle Knoll.

The story is told both from Annie’s perspective and through Frances’ by way of her diary entries back when Emily went missing. Aunt Frances, Emily and their friend Rose were close, but it was a complicated relationship between the three. Annie gets to know her Aunt through those pages, and the events that transpired. She’s determined to solve the case, as a lot is riding on her doing that.

I thoroughly enjoyed How to Solve Your Own Murder! It felt like a modern Agatha Christie. Quaint village setting, several suspects, and an observant heroine! Annie is clever, gleaning clues I wouldn’t have guessed, but made that perfect sense when revealed. I didn’t realize there’s another book coming, but look forward to Annie tackling another mystery, revisiting Castle Knoll with it’s interesting mix of characters, and hopefully seeing the hints of romance between Annie and a certain character come to fruition!

4.5 Stars

Book Description:

For fans of Knives Out and The Thursday Murder Club , 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.