A review by ninaprime
How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin

3.0

3.5 stars - amazing premise and title! Frances receives a haunting fortune from a psychic, and the ramifications unfold over the next few decades until her grand-niece Annie is summoned to Frances' estate, stumbles across her body, and is told she'll need to solve Frances' murder to gain her inheritance. Frances, her friends, and their stories are all very interesting and I wish Perrin had spent more time fleshing out the past instead of following Annie's bumbling. A "mystery writer" (in quotes because she's actually just laid off and not doing much of anything), she has some good ideas but zero sense of self preservation, a type of heroine that particularly annoys me. It is fun to see some of Frances' friends in their dotage, but the side characters in the modern storyline are more one-dimensional. There's also a bunch of side threads that don't fully get resolved, namely why is Saxon such a creep? This would be a good TV series, but doesn't fully work for me as a novel since it was so uneven in interestingness.