How to Cheat Your Own Death

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. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (Apr.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly implied that the character Annie’s mother was dead.