Book review: How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin

How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin is the second in the series featuring Annie Adams, who inherited her aunt’s fortune and the Gravesdown family mansion following Frances’s murder in the first book in the series. Annie is a wannabe crime writer but forced back to amateur sleuthing here when someone is killed in her kitchen. And we also link back to the first book in the series through the victim – the fortune teller who told Frances (when only aged 16) that she would (one day) be murdered.

Present day: Annie Adams is just settling into life in Castle Knoll when local fortune teller Peony Lane crosses her path and shares a cryptic message. When Peony Lane is found dead only hours later inside the locked Gravesdown Estate, Annie quickly realizes that someone is out to make her look guilty while silencing Peony at the same time. Annie has no choice but to delve into the dark secrets of Castle Knoll in order to find out just what Peony Lane was trying to warn her about, before the new life she’s just begun to build comes crashing down around her.

1967: A year has passed since her friend Emily disappeared, and teenage Frances Adams finds herself caught between two men. Ford Gravesdown is one of the only remaining members of a family known for its wealth and dubious uses of power. Archie Foyle is a local who can’t hold down a job and lives above the village pub. But when Frances teams up with Archie to investigate the car crash that claimed the lives of Ford’s family, it quickly becomes clear that this was no accident—hints of cover-ups, lies, and betrayals abound. The question is, just how far does the blackness creep through the heart of Castle Knoll? When Frances uncovers secrets kept by both Ford and Archie, she starts to wonder: What exactly has she gotten herself into?

We briefly meet Peony Lane when she herself is a teenager in the early 1960s before she reappears in the present day, requesting that Annie look into a murder that took place years earlier – believed to be simply a tragic car accident involving the Gravesdown family.

Perrin very cleverly again twists the present and past here as we return to Frances’s teenage years and events that (we now know) shaped her future. I must confess I struggled to remember exactly what happened in the previous book – but recall it similarly being linked to Frances’s past and her group of friends. They’re referenced again here and I felt it would have been easier to follow if I’d remembered the context of past events. In reality it just meant I had to focus and pay attention as we picked through the lead-up to the deaths of three Gravesdown family members in a car crash (gleaned through Frances’s journals) and how Peony’s knowledge and involvement with the family led to her murder.

I usually enjoy dual timelines novels (as I don’t read historical fiction but seem to be able to cope with a combination) but Perrin packs a lot of detail into the past here, and the complexities of family relationships in the present (including Annie’s) obfuscates the plot a little. That said, I liked this more than the first in the series.

This is an entertaining read and I enjoyed the company of Annie, her friend Jenny and Detective Crane (who also appeared in the first novel). And with Annie’s estranged father hovering, more of Frances’s journals to uncovered and Peony’s last fortunes yet to be read, I’m sure they’ll return.

How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin will be published by Quercus (Hachette) in Australia in late March 2025.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.