How to Solve Your Own Murder – Gripping Puzzle From Kristen Perrin

Last Updated on April 22, 2026

I love cozy mysteries so much that I actually created an entire website dedicated to them. That’s how deep my love for the genre goes!

Nothing makes me happier than picking up a novel and discovering, within about 10 pages, that my every spare minute will now be taken up with discovering whodunit.

That is exactly what happened with How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin.

I know I’ve arrived at the party late, given that there is already a sequel and the book is under option for a movie adaptation, but a cracker is a cracker, and if you’re looking for one, this is it.

It has it all – a dual story, two murders sixty years apart, a believable and smart lead amateur detective, and so many tidbits of info along the way that you genuinely have a chance at working it all out.

So let’s get into it…what exactly is How to Solve Your Own Murder all about??

Our Intrepid Sleuth, Annie Adams

Annie Adams is a budding mystery writer. Her mother is an eccentric artist, and her father, well, we don’t know a lot about him.

Mother and daughter live in Chelsea in a house owned by Annie’s Great Aunt Frances. Frances is a bit of an enigma, living in her sprawling estate in the small town of Castle Knoll.

Annie has never met Frances. The closest she’s ever gotten is sending back some old suitcases and trunks from the basement at the Chelsea house.

That, however, is why she now finds herself embroiled in a 60-year-old mystery. Annie receives a letter from a solicitor in Castle Knoll requesting a meeting with her Great Aunt Frances, advising that she is now the main beneficiary of her estate in the event of her death.

Annie, not only surprised by this update, is also intrigued and desperate to meet her Great Aunt, heads to Castle Knoll.

Unfortunately, it’s a little too late. Annie, the solicitor Walt Gordon, his grandson Oliver, Saxon Gravesdown (the nephew of the late Rutherford Gravesdown and original owner of the estate), and his wife Elva make their way to the estate only to discover Frances dead in her library.

And that’s when the whole story of how a 17-year-old girl went missing in 1966 and how it led to the murder of Frances Adams six decades later.

The Mystery

I don’t want to give anything away but to tell you nothing about the mystery would kind of defeat the purpose of my writing this so here goes…with just enough details to pique your interest.

In the Summer of 1965, Frances and her two best friends, Rose and Emily, go to a local village fair, and for a bit of laugh, Frances gets her fortune read by Peony Lane.

The fortune is enough to unnerve Frances and essentially tells her that, at some point, she will be betrayed and murdered.

Not only does this stick with Frances, it then becomes her entire world, particularly as one of the three girls goes missing the following year, never to be seen or heard from again.

Fast forward to the present day, and Frances Adams’ last will stipulates that she knows she has been murdered and that if either Annie Adams or Oliver Gravesdown figure out who did it, within a week, they will inherit the entire estate.

Should either the police (the very handsome Detective Crane) find the killer or either Annie or Saxon ends up being charged with a crime (or her murder) then the estate will be sold off piece by piece to a developer.

So Annie has one week to uncover the truth. But with secrets and lies around every corner, finding out what happened in 1966 and who murdered Frances will be tougher than she thinks.

Is It A Page Turner?

The entire crux on which this book stands is a central mystery so good that I absolutely could not put this book down.

There are two stories being told here, Annie’s and Great Aunt Frances’ via her diaries. There is also significant evidence collected and compiled by Frances over the sixty years that everybody has access to solve the crime.

And so the race begins to connect the past to the present and little by little determine what exactly happened all those years ago and just how and why it got got Frances murdered.

By the time the whole story is laid bare, it’s clear that if you have followed along and picked up the hints Perrin has peppered throughout the book, you can get pretty close to figuring out our whodunit.

Admittedly, despite my best attempts, I was a little off the mark, but that didn’t make the experience of reading the book until I was bleary-eyed any less exciting.

It’s a terrific puzzle, and thankfully, Annie Adams is a lead who is utterly convincing, both in her intellect and inexperience in solving a crime. She’s not naive or prone to making foolish decisions (my major bugbear with cozy mysteries).

Instead, she stays the course, putting the pieces together bit by bit by bit, linking and weaving the threads together until everything falls into place for her.

What she doesn’t know, though, is whether she is the first to do it…and whether or not she will even survive long enough to see justice done.

The Sequel

The second book, How to Seal Your Own Fate, due to be published in March 2025, picks up where the first one ended. In fact, there’s a couple of chapters at the back of the first book to get you started.

This book goes back a tad further to 1961, and it begins with the fortune teller, Peony Lane, who made the premonition that changed Frances’s life forever.

Now she has one for Annie, and it all ties into the Gravesdown family and a car crash that killed three members of the family.

But will Annie want to hear what Peony has to say?

I can’t wait to find out!