Book
How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin
Series
Book 1 in the “Castle Knoll Files” series
Synopsis
When she was a teenager, Frances received a cryptic reading from a fortune teller, predicting her betrayal and murder. Sixty years later, her prediction comes true, and the now-wealthy widow is found murdered in her own home. Now it’s up to her great niece Annie to piece together the decades’ worth of evidence her estranged and increasingly-paranoid relative collected over the years, since Frances’s will stipulates that the first to solve her murder will inherit her entire estate.
Notes
This book makes its ambitions clear in the first chapter: it aspires to be a popular, cozy murder mystery. There’s a fabulous manor house in the English countryside, a close-knit village full of history and secrets, rivals, love interests, and it even forces a scene where everyone is assembled to hear the solution to the mystery. Because of its premise, it’s also got stories taking place across two timelines, and a present in which the protagonist can make self-aware commentary on the story she’s in.
And it also really works. This book is extremely entertaining. The characters are pretty fun, the mysteries are well-paced, there are a few “a-ha!” moments of varying success, and the book makes sure that its readers are operating at the same pace as its characters, with frequent recaps and “did you notice the clue?” type moments. I was pleased with myself for solving part of the murder before the protagonist, and while I didn’t love the rest of the solution, it was fine and didn’t seem to come completely out of nowhere.
The book does veer a little too far into Lifetime Television for Women for my taste, with its love triangles and drama and sexy detective. I’m wondering now whether I should’ve started wearing aftershave when I was younger, since it’s apparently the first and most significant thing anyone notices about a man. And towards the end of the book, it becomes really blatant that it’s being set up for a sequel if not an indefinitely ongoing series. The acknowledgements of my copy include thanks to the people who sold the film rights. It’s entirely possible I’m hopelessly naive about the book business, but this struck me as putting the cart before the horse to a degree that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I don’t mind formula when it’s a single fan trying to recreate something they love, but I’m more suspicious of it when it feels as if it’s been mass-produced in a lab. In retrospect, even my own experience reading it felt as if it had been scientifically tuned to match the desired standard for these books: having fun reading off and on for the first day or two, and then suddenly getting engrossed at the halfway point and staying up way too late to finish it in one night.
There’s undoubtedly some level of sexism to that criticism, since I don’t seem to have as much problem with openly commercial literature when it’s about boy stuff instead of girl stuff. Michael Crichton famously wrote Jurassic Park specifically to be “the most expensive film ever made.” And Anthony Horowitz does this kind of thing all the time; commercial writing is practically the entire basis for my two favorite series of his mysteries.
But with How to Solve Your Own Murder, it made me go back and reconsider all of the affectations that were piled onto its protagonist: all the scenes where she’s biting her lower lip, her repeated insistence that she lacks confidence even as everyone around her just assumes she’s not just competent and qualified but uniquely gifted, her unassuming style that has her in old band T-shirts or sundresses that hide her figure, the way that she seems to be blithely ignorant of her own attractiveness. It seemed sincere — although disingenuously self-deprecating — when I thought that the character was supposed to be a surrogate for the author. But it feels a little false and chemically when I see that the protagonist is supposed to be a surrogate for the target audience. Not a manic pixie dream girl, but a just-as-artificial awkward, self-effacing, and somehow irresistibly attractive archetype that’s made by women, for women.
Verdict
Fun and extremely readable, with a solid mystery, an interesting double-timeline gimmick, and a great hook. I just wish I’d discovered it more organically, and it hadn’t been carefully and specifically constructed to be an “instant bestseller.”