How to Seal Your Own Fate
How to Seal Your Own Fate is the second mystery novel by Kristen Perrin featuring her fortune addled murder solver Annie Adams. In the first novel, How to Solve Your Own Murder Annie had to solve the long foretold murder of her great aunt Frances, and in doing so become the heir to her great fortune and manor house in the murderous village of Castle Knoll.
In this novel we pick up a few months after those events and Annie is settling into a routine in her new found pastoral setting. As sheās making her way into the village one morning she has a random encounter with Peony Lane, the local fortune teller who all those years ago gave her great aunt her haunting prediction. Peony tells Annie that itās important for her to investigate the life and death of Olivia Gravestone, a local socialite who died with other members of her family in a car crash in the 60s. Annieās interest is piqued, but her involvement in the investigation becomes more personal a few hours later, when the dead body of Peony Lane is found in Annieās Solarium just feet from where she was having lunch with her friend.
What follows a very typical modern murder mystery replete with two parallel but interlocking timelines. In the 1960s timeline we learn more about the late great aunt Frances and what she learned about the car crash and in the present we have more of Annieās sleuthing with an ever increasing body count. While I did ultimately enjoy the novel and I think that Perrin is a good writer, Iām hoping that the genre can move past the two timeline trope in the coming years. Flashbacks can be essential in murder mystery books, but reading about the characters in the past finding a big plot revelation and then having the characters in the present discover it a chapter or two later gets a little trite after a while. If authors are intent on sticking with this story design I at least hope someone could try and be subversive with itās use in the future.
If you read and enjoyed the first novel in the series, then I think youāll be happy enough with this follow up. If this sounds interesting to you, but you havenāt read the first one, I think I would suggest starting there. Unlike some of the other big modern mystery series of recent years, I think there is enough important setup in the first book that itās a necessary prerequisite for full enjoyment of the second. But on the bright side if you do enjoy it, youāll have at least two more to read as the third in the series was just released a few weeks ago.
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