How to Solve your Own Murder

 By: Kristen Perrin

Location: FIC PER

Genre: Murder, Mystery Thriller

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 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.

How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin is a well-crafted, entertaining whodunit. The narrative is presented from the perspective of Annie with Frances’s journal entries from the 1960s in chapters interspersed throughout the narrative. The author deftly weaves past and present events into a fluid, well-paced narrative with more than one intriguing mystery and several suspects in the fold. Even though we don’t get to meet adult Frances we get to know a lot about her from her journal entries from when she was a teenager on the cups of adulthood and details shared by those who knew her during her lifetime. Annie is an endearing protagonist – impulsive yet smart, perceptive and curious - and I enjoyed following her efforts in unraveling the mystery. I loved the atmospheric setting and enjoyed getting to know the characters (even the unlikable ones). Even though the story features a large cast of characters and several sub-plots woven into the narrative, at no point does the plot get overly complicated, ambiguous or convoluted. Though I wasn’t entirely surprised by the final revelation, I enjoyed how we got there and was intrigued by many of the developments along the way.

Overall, I found this novel to be an enjoyable cozy mystery and would be eager to explore future books in this series. Sojura review