Description from Amazon:
Frances
Adams always said she’d be murdered. She was right.
In 1965, Frances Adams is at an English country fair where a fortune-teller
makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. It is a
prediction that sparks her life’s work—trying to solve a crime that hasn’t
happened yet.
Nearly sixty years later, Annie Adams is summoned to a meeting at the sprawling
country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great-aunt Frances. But by the time
Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, Frances is found
murdered, just like she always said she would be. Annie is determined to catch
the killer, but thanks to Frances’s lifelong habit of digging up secrets and
lies, it seems every endearing and eccentric villager might just have a motive
for her murder.
Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Castle Knoll, or will
dredging up the past throw her into the path of a killer? As Annie gets closer
to the truth, and closer to danger, she starts to fear she might inherit her
aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.
So this started off as a rollicking
good detective mystery, and I loved the time changes where we got to see
Frances’s diary and the events of 1966 as well as the shift to present times.
The fact that some of the characters were still around and how their personalities
had stayed the same or changed made for a good competition to solve the murder.
But then the characters and
their places in the story started feeling weird. Like they had been written
into spots just for their name to appear so that you, as the reader, think to
link them to that section. Some were downright silly and some tried to appear
all-knowing yet contributed nothing. So here you have Annie, a wannabe writer,
who is somehow able to contribute more to the case than the cops themselves.
And, amazingly enough, is able to find the murder weapon the cops missed and removes
it from the crime scene to hand it in even though it could do the same to her?
The story behind the story
alongside the story just became too much. Like someone had taken different
puzzles and forced them into each other trying to make it fit as a pretty
picture. When I got to the end, I went back to see if pages had been torn out. All
of that for that ending? It was a big buildup about what Annie was going to do
and then in two pages it was done. With holes in things that were huge and
tangents flying wildly in the breeze. So much that was forced together just to
say it was done. I almost feel cheated as I really expected something that
could rival Knives Out or one of the Murder Club Mysteries… but
no…
