How to Solve Your Own Murder

How To Solve Your Own Murder (2024) by Kristin Perrin follows a young writer as she investigates the circumstances surrounding her great aunt’s death. Aided by her great aunt’s teenage journal, Annie Adams gets to know the local people and residents of her aunt’s estate, one of whom is a killer. If Annie fails to identify the murderer, she will lose her inheritance and her mother’s London home, and the entire town will be sold to a land developer. This novel is Perrin’s first published book for adults. Previously, Perrin released her middle-grade series Attie and the World Breakers in German, Dutch, and Polish.

This guide refers to the 2024 Penguin Random House eBook edition.

Content Warning: This novel contains depictions of death.

Plot Summary

In 1965, three teenage best friends, Frances Adams, Rose Forrester, and Emily Sparrow, hear Frances receive an ominous fortune that predicts her murder and betrayal by a “bird.” It scares Frances, who becomes obsessed with the fortune’s meaning. Soon after, Emily disappears, and Frances begins a journal.

In modern-day London, Annie Adams’s Great-Aunt Frances summons her to the small town of Castle Knoll to discuss being the sole beneficiary of a new will. Annie has never met Frances and is puzzled why the will switched away from Annie’s mother, Laura. Upon arrival, Annie meets Frances’s old friend, the lawyer Walter Gordon, his handsome but unfriendly grandson Oliver, and Elva, the snobbish wife of Frances’s husband’s nephew.

The group goes to Gravesdown Manor, and they find Frances dead, along with a bouquet of roses that have needles instead of thorns. In Frances’s study, there are murder investigation boards trying to figure out a girl named Emily’s disappearance and Frances’s own murder prediction, which has seemingly finally occurred. Annie finds Frances’s journal from the time Emily disappeared, and she keeps it as the paramedics, Joe Leroy and Magda, arrive.

Annie takes the flowers to the local police station and Detective Rowan Crane. She discovers that her own hands seem to be swelling. Crane takes her to Dr. Owusu’s office, where Annie faints. When she wakes, she’s told there was hemlock in the bouquet but that she is fine. Dr. Owusu and Crane both express that they liked Frances despite her paranoid ideas that someone was trying to murder her. Annie speculates that the bouquet is somehow the cause of Frances’s death despite the hemlock not being lethal in this form.

Frances’s journal reveals that Emily once talked their friend group into sneaking onto the Gravesdown estate. In this entry, they encounter a creepy little boy spying on them while at the estate. This is Saxon Gravesdown, the nephew of Ford Gravesdown. Ford Gravesdown, who is in his early 20s, appears to collect Saxon. He tells them to stay in certain parts of the estate and to bring Saxon to the house if they find him again. Then, Frances and her boyfriend John go off together, but Saxon interrupts them, and Frances takes Saxon to the manor house. There, Ford tells her about chess and needing a plan to win games. He says her friends treat her badly and she’s too good for them, implying they have been to the estate without her before and lied about it.

In the present, Frances’s will stipulates that Annie stay at the manor house along with Saxon and Oliver. She meets Archie Foyle, the gardener, and his daughter Beth who cooked for Frances. They both live on a farm on the estate along with Beth’s wife Miyuki, who runs a large animal clinic. Rose Leroy, one of Frances’s oldest friends whom Annie recognizes from the journal, now the owner of a hotel in town and the mother of the paramedic Joe Leroy, comes to the estate and is very upset by Frances’s death. The next day, Mr. Gordon reads Frances’s will with Detective Crane present. Frances gives Saxon and Annie a week to solve her murder. Whoever does so first gets the estate. If they fail or Detective Crane solves it first, the estate will be sold to the property developer Oliver works for and most of the town will be destroyed. Crane shows them an autopsy report that says it’s not the bouquet that killed Frances but rather a lethal injection of iron such as the amount given to horses.

In her journal, Frances writes that Emily is copying her in increasingly disturbing ways and won’t give her back a winter coat with buttons that have stags on them. They go back to the estate, where Emily presents a revolver within the context of a game she wants to play. Frances is disturbed and leaves. Saxon finds Frances and hints that Emily is pregnant. Frances returns, forces Emily to return the coat, and reveals Emily’s swollen belly. Emily’s furious boyfriend, Walt Gordon, accuses Frances’s boyfriend John, who doesn’t deny it. Walt tries to attack them both, hitting Emily. Frances fires the gun in her panic. She then runs to the estate, where Ford comforts her. Rose and Emily arrive, and Ford drives Emily and Frances home. Emily implies she and Ford have been intimate, though he is cold to her.

Annie finds cabinets full of files Frances kept on all the crimes and indiscretions she uncovered in Castle Knoll. Annie finds what appears to be a threatening note on her bed but realizes it’s very old. She finds the storage trunks she sent Frances, which had been in the basement of the Chelsea house that Annie and her mother live in. Annie sees a jacket with stag buttons shut in the lid of one of the trunks, looks inside, and finds a body. She almost faints but is certain it's Emily Sparrow. When the police come, she hears Oliver threaten to reveal something Archie Foyle doesn’t want him to. When Joe Leroy arrives, he threatens Oliver, who had badgered his mother Rose about selling her hotel. Crane reveals Saxon doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder. Annie realizes she sent Emily’s body to Frances, a discovery that made Frances change her will to include Annie. Annie suspects the body revealed something about how Emily died, and this revelation led to her murder. Crane insists he see the journal but says he will return it. He offers to let her read through it over dinner, where they both sit in comfortable silence and work. Annie verifies through the journal that Emily’s baby is her mother, Laura. Emily is Annie’s biological grandmother.

Annie goes to Archie’s farm, though he doesn’t want her there, and talks to Miyuki, who says her pharmacy was broken into and a lethal injection of iron was part of the items taken. Annie discovers Archie is growing illegal marijuana on the farm but promises to keep it secret. They follow an ambulance to the hotel, where Rose is worried because she got pricked by the same roses as Frances. It’s a false alarm, and Rose gives Annie a photo album of the three friends when they were teenagers. Annie goes home and finds another threat on her bed, but the words sound like they are meant for a teenage Emily. She figures out the combination on a locked file drawer using the words in Frances’s original fortune. Inside, she and Crane find a file revealing Saxon’s role in an illegal drug operation using Magda’s ambulances. She finds Saxon hiding in her wardrobe and her room destroyed. He says he’s found evidence that Mr. Gordon was cheating on Frances and asks for them to start working together since he will now be arrested for drug dealing, eliminating him from the competition. He will help her set up Magda and get evidence that Mr. Gordon got his murder weapon from her. Annie doesn’t like the idea as Saxon seems to be setting her up to get arrested for buying drugs from Magda. However, she agrees.

Frances’s journal reveals she helped Emily set up the adoption with Frances’s brother and secures Ford Gravesdown’s Chelsea house as a place for Emily to stay until she gives birth. Frances finds threatening notes in her coat pockets and worries. She doesn’t want to speak to John, now her ex-boyfriend, but he tells her Emily has had the baby but appears to be going back on her word. He and Frances suspect she is trying to trap Ford into marrying her, saying the baby is his. John and Walt Gordon are going to Chelsea to stop her. Frances initially goes but sees her brother’s car is home. She stops and is relieved he has the baby. He tells her Emily tried to take baby Laura back but relented when he paid her. Frances sees the Gravesdown driver and car go past and assumes Ford is going to Chelsea to be with Emily. Walt and John continue on as well. After that, Emily disappears. John reveals he and Walt broke down on the drive and never got to the house. He thinks Ford killed Emily. Frances avoids Ford, but it’s difficult as Rose is dating his driver. Ford reveals he wasn’t at the Chelsea house either when Emily disappeared. He writes Frances letters and sends gifts, finally convincing her to come to a Christmas party with Rose and his driver. Rose is eager for Frances and Ford to be together so they can be friend-couples. Frances sees he has redone some of his house to reflect her tastes. They kiss.

Annie wakes up at 3 in the morning and looks at the photo album, realizing she knows who killed Emily and who killed Frances. She gives evidence to Beth to take to Mr. Gordon and asks her best friend Jenny to call Detective Crane at 8 pm with an explanation. She and Saxon have planned to meet Magda at 7:45. She tells Dr. Owusu about Magda’s drug operation and asks the doctor to hint to Magda that Annie has solved the murder. Owusu says she will but that she is also telling Detective Crane. Saxon instructs Annie to call Magda asking to meet to buy some ketamine. He will call the police when Annie gets inside the ambulance. Magda will hear the traffic on the radio and panic, and then Annie can grab the drug stash, where they hope to find other iron injections with Mr. Gordon’s prints. Annie knows the plan is a stretch, but she has her own plan.

When Joe Leroy shows up instead of Magda at 7:45, Annie knows the plan is working. They go inside the ambulance, where Joe tries to kill her with an injection. She fights back while he reveals the truth—Frances realized Rose killed Emily and was going to reveal the murder. Joe felt he had to protect his mother. He jabs Annie and she faints from the needle and blood but is rescued by Mr. Gordon and Beth before he can inject. Annie wakes in Detective Crane’s arms. Back at the manor, she explains that the photos reveal it was Rose who was truly obsessed with Frances, wearing her clothes much more than Emily. She was in the car with Ford’s driver going to London, where she lured Emily into the basement and shot her with the pistol Frances had dropped. Joe was angry at Frances because Frances was going to turn Rose in for murdering their friend, despite all the love and loyalty Rose had shown her. Joe had asked Elva to deliver the flowers knowing Frances would prick her fingers, look more closely, get scared, and call an ambulance. He showed up and gave her an injection saying it was to help, but it killed her.

Mr. Gordon declares Annie has solved the case and will inherit the estate. Annie plans a memorial for Frances and invites the entire town. Oliver reveals he was the one putting the threats he found in Frances’s study on Annie’s bed because he felt powerless to do anything. Annie sees Rose one more time, saying those threats that were supposed to go to Emily were in Frances’s coat pockets and so went to Frances, feeding her paranoia about the fortune. Annie enjoys the memorial but is sad she didn’t get to know Frances in life. She is, however, excited when she finds blank journals Frances left behind, as if she is encouraging Annie to write her own adventures.