Can fortune tellers really predict the future? Annie Adams still carries around the fortune given to her by Peony Lane that keeps mentioning the word “heart.” One line, “Without its beating heart, your family will fall one by one,” carries an ominous tone. Annie would like to dismiss Peony’s words, but the soothsayer did know that Aunt Frances would be murdered. With hearts showing up, images in artwork and real, bloody ones on doorsteps, Annie knows she has to take Peony’s words seriously.
Annie is now a wealthy woman, thanks to an inheritance from Aunt Frances, whose murder she solved in How to Seal Your Own Fate. While the money allows her some independence, she still needs help dealing with her mother and her father, who has recently turned up in her life.
Laura Adams is an artist living in Chelsea. When Annie shows up for a visit, she finds out that her mother has taken on an apprentice, a young woman named Felicity Rowe. That’s only one shock Annie experiences after entering Laura’s workshop. Her mother’s latest paintings feature hearts, lots of hearts. She also learns that Felicity, aka Fliss, was set to marry Dectective Rowan Crane, someone Annie has become close to after they solved four murders together. “Of all the hearts in Castle Knoll, Detective Crane’s is the last one I expect to hear about being broken,” Annie thinks.
The plot gets darker. When a real heart turns up on Laura’s doorstep, she dismisses it as something left by a cat. Tossing out the heart in a dumpster, Annie finds Fliss’s body, missing her heart, on top of some of Laura’s canvases. Annie recognizes the scene from decades ago. Aunt Frances’s friend, Vera, was murdered in a similar manner. Is the same person responsible? Or is a copycat killer at work?
The narrative bounces between present time and 1968 with some of the same characters headlining the action. Vera’s brother, Max, sat next to Frances in Professor Dane’s class, “Understanding the Homicidal Mind.” While Frances becomes friends with Vera, she soon realizes that Max is not to be trusted. Frances’s family ran a bakery in Castle Knoll and, to afford college, she now works at a diner. Max thinks it would be fun for him, and embarrassing for Frances, to invite her to one of his family’s elegant parties. What Max doesn’t know is that Frances is good friends with Lord Ford Gravesdown, who is delighted to attend the soirée.
Max’s girlfriend, Elaine can’t stop herself from insulting Frances. “The Gravesdown lord and the village baker,” she exclaims. “Good to know that country tradition hasn’t died out, the peasants lining up for the lords to take them home.”
Elaine is the one who suffers the worst blow, however, when a painting is displayed showing her in the nude. Max’s intention was to humiliate his girlfriend and he enlisted Vera, who painted the portrait, to help. Frances realizes she is indeed in a viper’s nest and not even Ford will be able to protect her.
Vera is the one who meets an untimely death, her heart carved out of her chest. When Annie discovers Fliss’s body, the similarities are too close to be ignored. She joins forces with Rowen to find the killer, but since he’s not assigned the case, he and Annie have to work without having access to the evidence. Vera’s husband, Dr. Alasdair Huntington, a noted heart surgeon, was convicted of killing his wife. Since he’s no longer alive, did someone else kill Fliss? Or was Huntington innocent and someone else guilty of both murders?
There are so many characters in Kristen Perrin’s How to Cheat Your Own Death, that she includes a list in the front of the book. In the beginning, it’s helpful when flipping between decades, but soon each character becomes clearly defined and, whether in 1968 or present time, we understand motivations and who might actually be the killer.
Not everything is tied up in a neat bow, however. We eagerly await the fourth volume in this series.
How to Cheat Your Own Death
Kristen Perrin
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Top Bigstock photo by Nikki Zalewski
