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In 1965, Frances Adams goes to a fair with her two best friends and visits a fortune teller for fun. But the fun turns dark when the woman tells Frances someday she will be murdered. The fortune includes a few sentences with specific markers Frances memorizes and will end up watching out for her entire life. And about 60 years later, she is indeed found dead from unnatural causes.
Her great-niece, Annie Adams, is summoned from her home in London to Frances’ country estate. She’s never met Great-Aunt Frances, but while it’s been assumed her mother, Laura, would inherit her money and property, now Annie has been chosen. While the meeting was planned for Annie to visit with a living Frances and her lawyer, when they arrive at Frances’ estate, she’s dead.
Annie finds herself in the role of investigator. There is plenty of potential evidence, because Frances had collected any and all information (especially secrets) about anyone who came across her path. That also means there are plenty of suspects, even in the small town near the estate. And that means danger. As Annie sniffs out secrets, she’ll not only grab the attention of the murderer but anyone else who doesn’t want their dirt dug up.
How to Solve Your Own Murder is a clever mystery. It’s billed as an “enormously fun” cozy mystery like Knives Out or Thursday Murder Club, but I think that enticing readers to open its pages for those reasons will do it a disservice. It’s not really intense, but it does have plenty of serious issues running through it (so “cozy”…?). The same goes for it being “fun”; I’d say that’s true in that it has a clever conceit. But I don’t think I laughed or grinned once. That’s OK, though! Just don’t go into it expecting fun and laughs. There are hints at the end there will be more, as is clear by the “Castle Knoll Files, book 1” billing, but I think I’d prefer it more as a stand-alone. I guess time will tell once I read the next one.
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes 1 use of strong language, around a dozen instances of moderate profanity, a dozen uses of mild language, 5 uses of British (bl-) profanity, and 20 instances of the name of Deity in vain.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
