Review: Castle Knoll series

3/5 stars

How to Solve Your Own Murder and How to Seal Your Own Fate, by Kristen Perrin (2024 & 2025)

How to Solve Your Own Murder is a fun mystery that introduces Frances, a woman in her 80's who has spent almost her entire life trying to outrun a fortune-tellers prediction that she will, some day, be murdered. She has rooms full of files on everyone in the town of Castle Knoll - investigations into all the reasons they might want her dead, and the private indiscretions she uncovers in the process. The townspeople all think she's a little looney... until she turns up dead in her home, 60 years after the fateful fortune-telling. Now, it is up to her grand-niece Annie to expose the truth of Frances' murder, and, in the process, solve another decades-old mystery: the disappearance of a friend of Frances' when they were teenagers.

The narrative goes back and forth between present-day, where Annie and a few other colorful townsfolk work to solver the murder, and Frances' teenage diary from the mid-1960's. Many of the characters of Frances' youth make an appearance in the present-day storyline as well. I usually really love a story with multiple timelines, but in this case it felt really difficult to keep the characters straight. Who is Frances speaking about, and who is Annie meeting? Are the characters the same, or is it their relatives/children that are still in Caste Knoll? Who married who, and which people are related... Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think it's not really about the two timelines. It's just confusing writing. But, clearly I enjoyed it enough to read the second book of the series!

I won't say too much about How to Seal Your Own Fate, so I avoid spoilers, but basically Annie remains in Castle Knoll, and has to solve another murder. Again, she works "with" her deceased Aunt Frances, uncovering clues in the diaries that help explain the present-day death of Peony Lane, the woman who once predicted Frances' murder, and the 1960's car crash that killed most of the members of a local family. I started to get better at parsing out the characters in the second book, but I still think Perrin could have done a better job of making the individuals more distinct, or perhaps just having fewer "main" characters that the reader has to keep straight.

There is a third book slated to be published in 2026, but I'm not sure I need any more. I've enjoyed the characters, but they've run their course for me.

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UP NEXT: Model Home, by Rivers Solomon