How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin

How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin is the sequel to How to Solve Your Own Murder, which I enjoyed at the start of the year. I hadn’t realised there was a sequel, so it was a very happy find in Sainsbury’s! I haven’t felt excited about any of the books I’ve read in the last couple of months and How to Seal Your Own Fate was definitely my most enjoyable read since The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club book 5).

The events of How to Seal Your Own Fate take place a few months after the events of How to Solve Your Own Murder. Twenty-five-year-old Annie is settling into Gravesdown Hall, the large house she inherited from her Great Aunt Frances in the previous book. She is also starting to get used to life in the nearby village of Castle Knoll.

At the start of the story, she meets Peony Lane – the fortune teller who predicted Great Aunt Frances’s murder 60 years previously. Within an hour, Peony Lane is found murdered inside Annie’s house…

Annie is afraid of being accused of the murder, so she decides to conduct her own investigations by talking to local people and checking out Frances’ old diaries and files. The investigations into the murder go right back to a fatal car crash, which took place when Frances was young.

Can Annie work out who was responsible before she is arrested?

How to Seal Your Own Fate is very cleverly written, because many of the characters were friends of Frances as young adults and now they are elderly people who know Annie. So the investigations involve their memories – and the things they are trying to hide or forget. Some of the chapters are set in the 1960s and are narrated by Frances, so the reader can piece together how the past and present collide.

I loved How to Seal Your Own Fate. It is a fun murder mystery, with enough characters to get pretty complicated! If you enjoy a detective story without much gore, I would definitely recommend it. I would say you do need to read How to Solve Your Own Murder first though.

There is a third book in the Castle Knoll files series – How to Cheat Your Own Death – coming out next year, which I’m looking forward to reading.