After reading ten books this year, I have finally found my first definitive five star read of 2024. This review is going to be gleeful rubbish because I loved How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin and don’t know how to tell you more than “Good book, get it!”.
Annie’s great aunt Frances is an eccentric woman. She lives up at Castle Knoll, is rich and lets her mother live indefinitely in her house in the city. She even sends her struggling artist niece a tidy sum to keep her afloat. Annie finds herself summoned to the estate and discovers her body. What complicates the murder mystery is that the entire inheritance is supposed to be given to one of two named people who would find the killer in a time-boxed manner. Any surprise that Annie is one of them?
So this book is a perfect mashup of the classic and modern. It clearly pays homage to classic murder mysteries, but Kristen Perrin has clearly made it her own. There’s a ton of characters from the village who each have the motive to be fed up of Frances, since she was always troubling them with some suspicion or another, on the basis of a prophecy she heard years ago, which predicted her death. It’s exhausting when you think about it, because she was waiting to have an untimely death and race against her “fate”. And of course, many characters would give you the impression that she drained them of patience, at the least.
Circle back to that prophecy, because there’s a lot more to her past. Now that I re-visit the narrative structure of the book, nothing I’ve recently read is more suited to be a dramatic TV show. Want another Pretty Little Liars, anyone? I would love for this to be optioned. The book is written with a past and present timeline, with the present timeline written from Annie’s perspective, and Frances in the form of entries in her diary, and the latter paint a juicy picture with gossip, betrayal, and uneasy teen friendships. I thought I knew where things were going, but I couldn’t be more wrong, and for that too, I really loved the ending, as well as the kindness and compassion that Annie shows throughout the process. I already didn’t mention she’s an aspiring mystery writer, but this plays well into the investigation too.
I hope I haven’t spoken too soon, but I’m confident this will end up in my best reads of the year. Kristen Perrin is a star and has delivered my first definitive five-star read of the year. Fans of small town murder mysteries, take note. The book does hint that we might see more of the protagonist in the future, and I sure hope so.
I received an ARC of this book from the author/publisher. Quotes, if any, are taken from the ARC and are subject to change upon publication.
This title will be published Dutton Books in the U.S. and by Quercus Books in the U.K. later in March 2024.
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View details and add the book on Goodreads here | Purchase/pre-order the book on the publisher’s webshop – U.S. | U.K.
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I need to read this!
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You do! It’s a cozy comfort read!
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