How to Solve Your Own Murder: A Novel

Written by Kristen Perrin

Narrated by Alexandra Dowling and Jaye Jacobs

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A Jimmy Fallon’s Book Club Finalist for 2024 | A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist | A GMA Buzz Pick | A USA Today Bestseller

One of Jimmy Fallon's favorite books for Spring 2024, The Top LibraryReads pick for March 2024, A Publishers Marketplace 2024 BuzzBook, One of NPR's Books We Love

Frances Adams always said she’d be murdered. She was right.

In 1965, Frances Adams is at an English country fair where a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. It is a prediction that sparks her life’s work—trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet.

Nearly sixty years later, Annie Adams is 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 found murdered, just like she always said she would be. 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 danger, she starts to fear she might inherit her aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593828007

Kristen Perrin

Kristen Perrin is originally from Seattle, Washington, where she spent several years working as a bookseller before moving to the UK to do a master's and a PhD. She lives with her family in Surrey, where she can be found poking around vintage bookstores, stomping in the mud with her two kids, and collecting too many plants. How To Solve Your Own Murder is her debut adult novel.

Reviews for How to Solve Your Own Murder

[melissarochelle_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Small-town murder mystery set in the English countryside. I didn't figure out the mystery before the main character which is either a sign of my lack of intelligence or the brilliance of the author. I'm going with clever author. There were so many characters to keep straight though and the timeline was tricky. It took me far too long to realize that Frances's diary entries were written about events occurring months before she started writing. I don't know if I'll read more in this series, but it was a nice fill-in while I wait for the next The Thursday Murder Club book. If you like this one, I highly recommend checking out A Dictionary of Scoundrels - also English countryside murder mystery but with the added cleverness of etymology.

[susankrzywicki · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Slightly irritating, but clever. The author writes about some serious manipulators in the past, and I didn't enjoy that. But the modern-era sleuthing seems pretty good.

[fabuliz-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I didn't know what to think when I started this book, but within the first few pages, it grabbed my attention and led the way to unfold an interestingly interwoven murder mystery. Overall, I enjoyed it.

[gingirl70 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Almost 60 years after she's told she'll be murdered, the prophecy comes true. Yes, it's as anticlimactic as it sounds. The story covers two timelines and neither was all that interesting and I really wasn't invested in any of the characters.

[carriewuj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 Entertaining audio book that was a good segue into summer, and it's always good to start at the beginning of a new series. Annabel (Annie) Adams is flailing a bit in her 20s in London, looking for meaningful work, living back at home, and trying to write mysteries. The perfect opportunity lands in her lap when she gets a letter from her Great-Aunt Frances to come out to her country estate to meet her. She has been funding the Chelsea apartment where Annie and her artist mother Laura live, but Annie has never met her and Laura is not a fan. Frances has a reputation as an eccentric to put it kindly. As a teenager in 1965, she had her future/fortune told by a psychic - a cryptic paragraph of possible meanings that Frances internalizes. Her best friends Emily and Rose try to dispel it, but their friendship is shifting anyway as Emily's behavior becomes more wild and dangerous, and ultimately she goes missing. Frances is convinced this is part of her path as well and devotes her life to investigating this and her own future in their small hamlet of Castle Knoll. She also marries the Lord, none of which endears her to the townspeople. By the time Annie arrives, Frances has been murdered. But Frances has planned for this eventuality all her adult life! Her will stipulates that whoever solves her murder between Annie, her smarmy suspicious nephew Saxon, and the solicitor's grandson Oliver, a real estate developer will inherit everything - her money, the estate, and the Chelsea apartment. And they have to do it before the hunky local Detective Crane. And the solicitor, Frances' old friend Walter Gordon will be the arbiter. High stakes. Luckily, Frances has her own murder board and files full of dirt on everyone in town, along with a diary from her teen years. All of this is indispensible to Annie, an outsider, who is at the distinct disadvantage of never knowing her great-aunt. It becomes a quest - not just to save her home, but also to vindicate Frances and restore her reputation. Annie is thrown into the past, puzzling out relationships and connections and much of it does indeed link to Emily's disappearance. Luckily too, Annie thinks like a mystery-solver since she is taking a stab at writing one. I think because this was audio and I had jumbled up listening time, it was a little harder to follow than the written version would be. Definitely in the classic mystery vein with surprises at many turns, and an 'of course!' feeling in its solution (though I didn't guess). Deductive reasoning on overload.

[electrascaife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Annie has never met her great-aunt Frances, but she’s grown up living with her mother in the London townhouse owned by the old woman. Then one day she gets a letter saying Frances wants to meet her because she’s changed her will, leaving everything to Annie instead of to Annie’s mother. But when she arrives at the small English village to meet with Frances, the lawyer, and an unexpected group of other people with interests in the will, Frances turns up dead before any such meeting can happen. It’s common knowledge that the old woman had been trying to figure out who would murder her since she was a teenager, having become obsessed with a fortune teller’s reading, and part of the will stipulates that, in the event she *is* murdered, Annie will compete against two others, and in addition the police, to be the first to solve the crime and hence win the estate.

I think I needed to read this one on paper instead of listen to it, maybe. I found my mind wandering too much. Too many characters, too many various motives, and too many threads to keep track of as easily as I’d like for a book whose characters I just couldn’t be arsed to care about enough. That sounds overly harsh, because I didn’t actively dislike the story at all. I just wasn’t…excited about it at all either, I guess.

[treebeard_404 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely delightful. I burned through it in only 4 days because I couldn't put it down.

[cecilturtle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really loved this tale told from two main points of view, Frances and her great niece, Annie. The original structure that jumps from the past to the present, straddling three generations keeps the reader engrossed and on her toes. The characters are complex, the village full of secrets, vices and unexpected virtues, and the plot has layer upon layer. As with all thrillers, the ending is rather over-the-top and Annie's plan is rather convoluted, but I kept turning the pages, eager for the denouement. Future books are also cleverly announced - I'm in for a series!

[ethel55_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this, and it has helped me out of a recent reading slump. Castle Knoll and its' people were a delight. The story moves between two timelines and for once, each was a riveting as the other. Both Frances' journal from 1966 and the present day with her great niece Annie were filled with red herrings, The way the dire fortune Frances learns as a young woman and the disappearance of her friend Emily shaped Frances' life right up until the end.

[bookappeal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When Frances had her fortune told as a teen, she was told she'd be murdered, a prediction she takes seriously for the rest of her long life, making her a somewhat suspicious and isolated person. In fact, her great niece has never even met her and is extremely surprised to be summoned by Great Aunt Frances' lawyer to discuss changes to her will. This fun premise quickly becomes bogged down with too many characters, all of whom interact with each other, sometimes in two timelines. In addition, characters' rationales and motivations are often nonsensical or poorly explained. The narrative contains at least two glaring logical errors - one in the teenage writings of Great Aunt Frances (when she refers to wisdom she gained about relationships, presumably much later in life) and another when Annie neglects to use her phone to take photos of diary entries she does not have time to read (even though she did with another clue a few chapters earlier). Frances and her two friends are supposed to be very close but Frances' diary paints a different picture. Other elements of the narrative are never explained. Perrin's writing style is easy to read and may appeal to casual readers who are able to overlook the inconsistencies in this jumbled mess of amateur investigating.

[kimkimkim-7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was tempted to think of this as a cozy little murder mystery but it had greater gravitas than cozy or little or maybe not, but I really didn’t care. The opening sentence set the stage for the story. So either it is going to grab you at page one, line one, or not. Consider me grabbed and it only got better as I wound through the history of a group of lifelong friends. It had all the elements for a super “who did what to who” with twists, turns, backtracking, and murder. There is a fortune to be won if a mystery is solved among a large, mixed bag of characters. You can quickly suss out who to trust, who to be cautious around, who is just not easily defined with a few red herrings thrown into the mix. I think my favorite character was The Diary, which seemed to have it’s own life.

I was so glad to have the opportunity to read this book. Thanks to Dutton/Penguin Random House and NetGalley for a copy.

[kalliegrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a very well done cozy-ish mystery with an interesting premise and cast of characters. The competition to solve the murder was a good time constraint, and the flashbacks via journal entries were well done and didn't make me wish we were staying in the present timeline. I will check out whatever comes next in this series for sure.

[bookczuk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this little mystery, based on what happens if you have your fortune told and live your life trying to outfox it/interpret it and avoid your future murder? It took me a while to sort out the teens in the backstory, and still had to stop and recheck my memory when one or another surfaced/was referenced in modern day. I also had to remind myself this was set in England, because there was a distinct streak of American English in it, which I found oddly disorienting. That's never happened to me before in a cozy. But, it was an enjoyable read, and while I didn't really realize it was the beginning of a series, I liked it enough to see how the next book or so plays out. (I've got to stop putting off reviewing the books I read. My mind forgets so many details I should like to share. Sorry!)

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Annie lives with her artist mom at a home that's owned by her Great Aunt Frances, whom Annie has never met. But when Great Aunt Frances summons Annie and others, including her lawyer, to her estate for a meeting, they anticipate a change in Frances's will. What they don't expect is for Frances to be murdered, and for the fortune she received 60 years ago to apparently come true. Frances's will stipulates that Annie or the nephew, Saxon, must solve the murder before the local detective in order to be named her heir. Annie finds herself intrigued by the mystery - and all the gossipy files Frances kept on everybody - and starts investigating.

A fun mystery that is drawing some comparisons to "Knives Out", which does match its quirkiness but which is probably better executed. How to Solve Your Own Murder is Perrin's adult debut, and does have a few issues to work out. I never really understood the point of having the fortune and whether it was real or a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy as Frances interpreted everything through its lens. The back and forth between Frances' diaries from her teenage years in the '60s and Annie's investigation made for good pacing, and the characters were all intriguing. We're kept a little bit in the dark of all that Annie figures out so the reveal is a bit Agatha Christie-like where everything comes together at once and the murderer confesses. If you like cozy mysteries set in a small English town, this one is worth a library borrow at the very least.

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When 3 young girls attend a country fair and hear their fortune, Frances is shocked to hear that hers includes murder. Her friends Emily and Rose tell her it is silly. But, Frances takes the fortune to heart and lives her life according to the prediction.
Her great niece, Annie Adams, is called to hear changes to Great Aunt Frances's will, but when she arrives, she finds that Frances has been murdered, fulfilling the prophecy. Annie is determined to find out what happened to her aunt. What she uncovers is years of secrecy and a jealousy that was murderous.

[nicole_a_davis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A really fun murder mystery with essentially two plot lines and two murders to solve at once. The characters were good although keeping all the family connections straight was a little tough. The plot kept me guessing until the end! My only complaint was that the romantic tension between Annie and the detective didn’t get resolved but I suppose that’s what sequels are for.

[blbooks-14314 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First sentence: "Your future contains dry bones."

Premise/plot: Frances Adams receives a fortune at a country fair that changes the lives of her and her friends in Kristen Perrin's newest mystery novel. The mystery has dual time periods. Frances' journal/diary is from 1965/1966. The present story is told from the point of view of her great-niece, Annie Adams. It seems that Frances' fortune that she would be murdered was accurate. It is up to Annie (and several others) to solve her murder and possibly inherit her estate. Frances spent most of her life--all her adult life--preparing for the day. She took NOTES and kept files and records on anybody/everybody. So Annie will have a lot of material to work from...but it might just prove dangerous. The person who murdered Frances might not hesitate to murder again...

My thoughts: I really LOVED this one. There were multiple crimes to solve. The characterization was substantive. So MANY characters--all of them quirky/interesting. Plenty of people might have motives for wanting Frances to mind her own business...but who would kill to protect a secret? There are red herrings. But I really enjoyed puzzling this one out. I enjoyed BOTH narratives. Definitely recommend this one.

[susan.h.schofield · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was such a fun book! I loved the murder mystery and it kept me guessing the whole time. It had a little 0f everything - mystery, humor and intrigue. The comparisons to Knives Out are spot on. I look forward to reading more from this author and in this series. Thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC.

[bibliovermis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A real multitude of mysteries in one package—a murder now, the solution of which is a timed inheritance contest, is linked to a historical missing persons case, which is related to a big family secret, all of which is wrapped around the murder victim who spent seemingly her whole life trusting no one and nosing around her neighbors and discovering their secrets (all of which, both her life and death, were a bit too tragic). There's a lot to follow, some parts are more engaging than others, and gosh is it difficult to care very much about all these rich people.

[srms.reads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Your future contains dry bones. Your slow demise begins right when you hold the queen in the palm of one hand. Beware the bird, for it will betray you. And from that, there’s no coming back. But daughters are the key to justice, find the right one and keep her close. All signs point toward your murder.”


Frances Adams has lived her life wary of the prophecy given by a fortune teller she met as a sixteen-year-old in 1965. Throughout her life she has tried to collect as much information as she could on friends, family, and almost everyone in her circle, all relevant information documented on private files and the puzzle depicted on her very own murder board, to identify those who could possibly be plotting her murder. Sixty years later, she is found dead in her lavish home in the English countryside and she has left specific instructions on how she wants her murder investigated.

Aspiring mystery writer Annabelle “Annie” Adams is summoned by her estranged Great-Aunt Frances’s solicitors to meet her for the very first time in connection to revisions made in Frances’s will. Unfortunately, Frances is found murdered the day Annie arrives in Castle Knoll. As per Frances’s last wishes, Annie and her relatives are in competition to find Frances’s killer. Whoever can solve the mystery within a stipulated time frame or before the police – will inherit Frances’s estate – not an easy task in itself compounded by the fact that Frances made enough enemies by digging up dirt on everyone she knew. Everyone Annie meets has secrets they want to protect and with a murderer in their midst, Annie needs to work fast before she becomes the killer’s next target.

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.

Many thanks to Penguin Group Dutton for the digital review copy via NetGalley. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

[kmartin802_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This mystery takes place in two time periods. It begins with a teenager named Frances Adams going to a fortune-teller with her two best friends in 1965 and receiving a fortune that will haunt her life. The fortune teller says that she will be murdered!

Frances spends the rest of her life trying to discover who is going to kill her until she is finally killed nearly 60 years later. On the way, she creates all sorts of files about the people she connects with which contain many of their secrets.

In the present day, Annie Adams receives a summons to the small village to learn about what will be coming to her in her great-aunt's will. Annie has never met her great-aunt although she and her artist mother live in her great-aunt's London home and have for most of Annie's life. Annie has recently lost her job as an administrative assistant and wants to become an author of mysteries. She has sent her first book out to agents and publishers.

When Annie gets to the village, she meets the lawyer and other potential heirs but doesn't meet her aunt. When they go to her aunt's home, they discover her dead in suspicious circumstances. When the will is read a couple of days later, Annie learns that she has a week to discover who murdered her aunt if she wants to inherit all of her millions. She is in competition with her aunt's nephew by marriage and with the police. If the murderer is not discovered in a week the property will be sold to property developers and the monies donated.

Annie does have her great-aunt's journal to help her which is the way we get to know Frances Adams too. I liked that way the story switched from the past to the present and back again. I liked Annie's determination to solve the murder both as a way of getting to know her great-aunt and as a way to save the many villagers who life would be ruined if the property was sold for development.

This was an engaging mystery. I really enjoyed it.