27 March 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-52943010-3 (HB)
Annie Adams is attempting to settle into her new home, Gravesdown Hall, which she inherited from her great-aunt, Frances. In 1965, when she was a young woman, Frances had encountered a fortune teller who called herself Peony Lane. This woman predicted that Frances’ would be murdered, but nobody that Frances told believed her fears seriously. In response to this, Frances had spent the rest of her life gathering guilty secrets about everybody she knew, in an attempt to avoid the fate Peony had predicted. This resulted in her accumulating a vast store of knowledge about those around her, which she kept in the library of Gravesdown Hall.
Sixty years later, it was in this same library that Annie found Frances’ body, and, as Peony Lane had prophesied, she had been murdered. In her will, Frances had left her property to the person who solved her murder. Using the information in Frances’ library, Annie was the person who achieved this condition and received the bequest.
However, now she has her inheritance, Annie feels uncomfortable in her new surroundings, and she is very lonely. The people of Castle Knoll, the nearby town, are distant and unfriendly because they feel wary of Annie, as they know that she is the custodian of her great aunt’s information about them.
Annie goes for long walks as a way of combating her loneliness, and one day, on the outskirts of the Gravesdown Hall estate, she encounters Peony Lane. Annie is desperate to avoid falling into the same trap as Frances but, before she can escape, Peony tells her she should look into the death of Olivia Gravesdown, who had died many years ago in a car crash, along with her husband and her father-in-law. Annie wants to leave before Peony makes a prediction about her own fate, and she hurries away from her. However, before she leaves, Peony suggests that she goes to visit Archie Foyle, one of the people who knew Frances well.
During her visit to Archie, the large water wheel at the front of his farmhouse grinds to a halt, and when Annie and Archie investigate, they find the wheel is blocked by an ornate knife. Annie takes the knife to Detective Rowan Crane, who co-operated with her when she investigated Frances’ murder. Unfortunately, Crane has a new Detective Chief Inspector who continually butts in on Crane’s cases, and he treats Annie’s discovery with contempt and tells her to take it away.
Annie arrives home and finds Jenny, a friend from London, waiting on her doorstep, which is a good thing because she has someone to vouch for her when, very shortly afterwards, they discover Peony Lane dead in Annie’s solarium with the ruby-handled knife in her back and a piece of paper clutched in her hand. Annie is determined to investigate Peony’s murder, as well as the historical death that Peony had indicated, a task not made any easier because some of Frances’ records are missing, and she had indexed the records by the initial letter of the disreputable secrets she had discovered, rather than by the people’s names. Annie feels very vulnerable, aware that it seems probable that someone has secret access to her house. Uncertain who she can trust, she is afraid that she may not be able to avoid replicating her great aunt’s fate.
How to Seal Your Own Fate is the second book in The Castle Knoll Files, which feature Annie Adams. Although it is a stand-alone novel, it is very closely linked to the first novel, How to Solve Your Own Murder, in which many of the characters and settings are introduced as Annie investigates Frances’ murder. How to Seal Your Own Fate has a likeable protagonist and a clever story structure, with the bulk of chapters in Annie’s viewpoint and set in contemporary times, and others in Frances’ viewpoint and set in 1967.
This is an unusual and interesting book, with an intriguing structure and a
tantalising final line.
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Reviewer:
Carol Westron
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