How to Solve Your Own Murder is a novel about an elderly woman who has been trying to prove since she was seventeen years old that someone is trying to kill her. A fortune teller told her so, and she believes it. And as it turns out, they were both right.
In 1965 Frances Adams and her two best friends stopped by a carnival fortune teller's table on a lark, expecting that they would hear one of those boilerplate, one-size-fits-all fortunes that are so easily laughed off. Instead, Frances was warned that her life would almost certainly end at the hands of a murderer. From that moment on, Frances began to watch everyone around her through new eyes - always trying to identify her potential killer before it was too late. In later years, Frances would even take to creating her own murder board, the kind you find in homicide investigations. Her photo was in the center, surrounded by all those she thought might wish her dead.
Annie Adams, Frances's great-niece, who lives alone with her mother in a house owned by the old woman has never actually met her great-aunt. Then one day, to her great surprise, Annie is asked to come to tiny Castle Knoll to attend a meeting with her aunt and several other people where an announcement of some sort is to be made. But on the very morning of that meeting, Frances finally meets her fate and a very different kind of meeting is in order.
Frances is dead. Is it because she finally solved her own murder, but failed to prevent it?
The more Annie learns about her great-aunt, the more determined she becomes to identify the killer and to complete the task Frances spent a lifetime working on. But will Annie suffer the same fate her aunt suffered before justice can be served?
Kristen Perrin has written a mystery here that is a whole lot of fun, one that reminds me very much of the kind of classic cozy mystery written in the 1920s and 1930s. The characters are all eccentric, and there are plenty of them for the reader, and for Annie as the big city outsider trying to identify a killer, to keep track of. Chapters of Annie's first person narration are alternated with chapters featuring excerpts from Frances's teenaged diary to tie together what happened in the '60s and her death all these decades later. And I'm happy to say that Perrin plays fair with her readers in How to Solve Your Own Murder. If you don't figure out this one for yourself, rest assured that it will all make perfect sense to you at the end. No irritating bolts of lightning out of a pure blue sky from this one to irritate you.
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| Kristen Perrin publicity photo |
I am looking forward to this! Glad you enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteConstance, I really liked it, and thought that several of the characters were really nicely done. It's one of the relatively few mysteries that I figured out by the halfway point, but that got me to read even faster to confirm my suspicions. That seldom happens for me.
DeleteWaiting your whole life to be murdered...not a pleasant thought. But both Frances and Annie sound like fun characters.
ReplyDeleteThey are fun characters, for sure, Lark. And the funny thing is that they are so much alike despite being separated by two generations and never actually having met.
DeleteSee, you had already reviewed this one! LOL! Definitely one I will read at some stage. It sounds excellent.
ReplyDeleteI hope you like it as much as I did, Cath.
DeleteI want to read this one too, now that I have read the premise and you enjoyed it, but it could be a while. I am not buying books until September and I would be wanting to find an inexpensive copy anyway.
ReplyDeleteThis one would work great as an audiobook read, too, I'm betting. But I don't know if it's been recorded or released yet in that format. I wouldn't mind reading a sequel of this one because of the way that it ended with so many possibilities.
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