Flower arranging may have been Great Aunt Frances' hobby, but it looks like murder was her life.
How to Solve Your Own Murder
by Kristen Perrin
Genre: Murder Mystery
About: When Frances is sixteen, a simple village fete changes her life. She's told during a psychic reading that 'all signs point to her murder'. A year later one of her closest friends goes missing and Frances spends the rest of her life making files on all the villagers, searching for her potential murderer. But she's killed before she can solve it. Whichever of her chosen benefactors can discover her murderer will inherit her entire fortune. Luckily her great niece is an aspiring murder mystery writer...
Thoughts
This has such a cool premise and the pace really delivers to keep you interested from start to finish. I loved the atmosphere of the beginning - the prophecy, the friendship of the girls, and the reveal that one of them goes missing just a year later. There are a lot of layers to the mysteries and it constantly makes you doubt and puzzle over what really happened all those years ago in this quiet country village.
The dual timeline worked so well to feed bits of information while adding in more questions. It also helped to keep all the characters clear in my mind: most of the suspects were in both timelines, or they were related to someone from the past so that gave a lot of backstory and personality to quite a long list of names.
Of the timelines, I definitely preferred Frances' POV to Annie's. Her diary entries, while not exactly realistic as diary entries, had a lot of tension and atmosphere. Saxon made you feel so uneasy. Ford was so mysterious. Emily was so toxic. It had a tonne of drama and the little details peppered in there were subtle but painted a full picture by the end.
I did solve one of the murders about halfway through, but I loved how many mysteries there were and how we weren't just checking alibis or looking for slips in conversations, but actually having to think about the physical evidence. I feel like modern mysteries focus on maybe one item (a murder weapon or missing jewellery typically) and then it's a lot of talking to unmask the killer's hidden personality. This book had fun with lots of investigative tools. Lock combinations, stolen items, threatening notes, photo albums. As well as nailing down where everyone was and sorting through their lies.
Some of the characters were a bit too theatrical and one of the reasons I didn't like Annie's POV so much was her habit of over-describing people - like she was character outlining. But other characters had a lot of depth to them and I enjoyed so many of the twists that added more to their stories.
Overall this was dramatic, exciting, with a great build up of moments. It has a very inventive premise and Perrin never drops the ball on delivering that premise.
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