How to Cheat Your Own Death
A Novel
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4.4 • 37 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the gritty streets of 1960s Soho to the lofty galleries of present-day West London, two interlocking mysteries decades apart unfold in this latest instalment in the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Castle Knoll Murder Mystery series
Some secrets are deadlier than others
1968: Frances Adams is loving her new London life, and she’s stepped into a world of glamour thanks to her new friend, Vera Huntington--a magnetic socialite as mysterious as she is provocative. Vera dances around London like she owns it, taking Frances with her.
Present day: When Annie Adams heads to London to visit her famous artist mother, Laura, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body. Least of all for it to be Laura’s new protégée, left in an alley with her heart surgically removed from her chest.
Annie is no stranger to murder--after all, she’s solved a few already. And something about this case feels familiar. She’s read about one just like it in the journals of her late great aunt Frances, whose friend Vera was killed in the 1960s in the exact same way.
As Annie investigates, threats pile up on Laura’s doorstep, and it soon becomes clear that she’s next. With her mother’s life on the line, can Annie find the killer before it’s too late?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Perrin's clever third whodunit set in the English village of Castle Knoll (after How to Seal Your Own Fate) fleshes out the series' backstory with a dual timeline mystery. In 1968, Frances Adams enrolls in the psychology department of University College London after a fortune teller informs her that she will be murdered (a prediction that comes true, decades later, in the first book in the series, How to Solve Your Own Murder). At school, Frances develops a knack for amateur detective work, and she probes the case of an acquaintance who's found in an alley with her heart excised. Frances's investigation alternates with a contemporary one set in Castle Knoll and featuring her great-niece Annie Adams, who's haunted by a similar prediction from a psychic that "it will be your own heart, if left unguarded, that's ripe for the knife." Not long after she hears the prediction, Annie finds a corpse in a garbage bin, its heart removed, lying on top of an assortment of paintings by Annie's mother. Perrin provides a keenly satisfying answer to the core question of whether the same killer is responsible for both murders, decades apart. Ingenious plotting and a menacing atmosphere make this irresistible.
