How to Solve Your Own Murder

This is a nicely quirky and intriguing little mystery. Frances is a teenager in the mid-1960s when a fortune teller gives her a dire-sounding prediction that shadows the rest of her life and ends up shattering her relationship with her two closest friends. Frances believes, as a result of this prophecy, that she will be murdered — and although she lives to be seventy-five, the obsession with figuring out who’s going to kill her and preventing it dominates her whole life.

Enter Frances’s great-niece Annie is summoned to a meeting about her great-aunt’s estate, only to arrive just as Frances is (finally!) murdered. Following some very unorthodox instructions in Frances’s will, Annie sets out to solve her aunt’s murder. Her quest to do so is juxtaposed with scenes from Frances’s girlhood as she deals with the fallout from the fortune-telling.

While I thought there were some big leaps of logic in this novel, I enjoyed the dual-timeline mystery, thought some of the characters were fun, and, crucially, did not guess whodunnit. It was a light and enjoyable read.