RAndy's Book Reviews

Providing book reviews from a couple of bookaholics

HTSYOM Cover

How To Solve Your Own Murder

March 27, 20242 min read

SYNOPSIS: A teenager and her two best friends go to a fortune teller who predicts that Frances will be murdered someday. This begins a lifetime of paranoia and a massive amount of dirt on everyone in the rural English countryside town she lives in. No one takes the prediction seriously and after sixty years (and many major life events) Annie Adams receives the news that her great aunt Frances is changing her will to include her in it. She must leave right away to hear how things will change, but when she gets to the town of Castle Knoll, she finds Frances murdered in her mansion. Now Annie, with the help of her great-aunt’s personal journal, is left to solve the mystery in a hurry all the while becoming suspicious of almost every person in the little town.


MY THOUGHTS: First of all, THAT TITLE! I was hooked based on the title and the description of this book. Unfortunately, it fell short for me. When you read the blurb on the back of the book, you hope that it doesn’t take much to get past the main plot, but I think this book was probably a hundred pages too long. The pace was slow and I wished that it was just done better. It wasn’t that the writing was bad–I actually quite liked it. Although we find the body fairly quickly, it takes a third of the book to get moving…slowly. The last 15-20% of the book was much more entertaining, and I really did want to know what happened. The ending was difficult to guess because there was a whole town–and I mean like 10-15 characters–that could have been involved in this murder. The cast of characters was hard to keep track of, but in the end if you like a good Agatha Christie novel or a riveting game of Clue, this one might be for you!

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