Tag: Book Review

How to Solve Your Own Murder

“Well-written with enough twists and turns to keep a reader turning the pages, Perrin weaves a taut and unusual tale.”

Frances Adams is a teenager in 1965 when she and two friends are visiting an English country fair on a lovely day. But the day suddenly turns dark when Madame Peony Lane, a fortune teller in a turban who sits behind a gaudy beaded curtain, makes a dire prediction, one that will haunt Frances her entire life.

“Your future contains dry bones,” Peony forecasts in a kitschy Hollywood way. “Your slow demise begins right when you hold the queen in the palm of one hand. Beware the bird for it will betray you. And from that, there’s no coming back. But daughters are the key to justice, find the right one and keep her close. All signs point toward your murder.”

Her two friends Emily and Rose don’t take it seriously, seeing it as so flimsy and fake so they tease her about it. But Frances is uneasy and becomes moreso with each word that Peony Lane utters.

After leaving the fortune teller’s tent, Frances gasps when Emily ties her hair up a ribbon and then fastens a bird necklace around her neck.

“A bird,” Frances says, her eyes narrowing. “The fortune teller said the bird will betray you.”

Emily dashes away and returns with two more silver bird necklaces, one for Rose and one for Frances.

“That way you’ll never know which bird betrayed you. You could even betray yourself,” she tells her friends with a laugh.

But life takes a strange turn. Within a year, they aren’t friends any longer and one of them has disappeared. In the open file kept by the police is a small plastic bag containing a silver chain with a tiny bird clinging to it.

The missing woman isn’t Frances, who embarks upon a strange and lifelong task of trying to solve a murder that hasn’t been committed yet. Sixty years later from when she first receives the warning, Frances is found murdered.

When Annie Adams arrives at her Great Aunt Frances’ estate in the country village of Castle Knoll she becomes determined to find her great aunt’s killer, a task that includes delving into voluminous amount of files and uncovering secrets in her search to find out what happened.

But there is a problem. It won’t be easy to solve the murder, even in as small a village as Castle Knoll. Frances so studiously peered into so many people’s lives in an attempt to discover her killer that almost everyone in the village has a reason for wanting her dead.

“I think of Great Aunt Frances’s murder board, all its crisscrosses of colored string and the different photos there. She suspected the whole town of having a reason to kill her, and seemed completely oblivious to the fact that her suspicious and  incessant digging probably gave them those reasons to begin with,” writes Annie who  tells the present-day story, which is interspersed with The Castle Knoll  Files that Frances started writing shortly after her encounter with the fortune teller.

And now as Annie tries to unravel the mystery, she gives all those potential murderers a reason to commit another one.

How to Solve Your Own Murder (Dutton 2024) is the first adult novel of Kristen Perrin who is originally from Seattle and worked as a bookseller before moving to England where she earned her master’s degree and PhD. How to Solve You Own Murder has garnered great buzz being chosen as A Jimmy Fallon’s Book Club Finalist for 2024, A GMA Buzz Pick!, One of Amazon’s Top 10 Best Books of April, The Top LibraryReads pick for March 2024, and A Publishers Marketplace 2024 BuzzBook.

Well-written with enough twists and turns to keep a reader turning the pages, Perrin weaves a taut and unusual tale.

This book was originally reviewed in the New York Journal of Books.

Women Who Murder by Mitzi Szereto

“For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

—Rudyard Kipling, from the poem “The Female of the Species.”

“Why is that we’re always so shocked when women commit violent crimes, in particular, the crime of murder? Perhaps we’re more accustomed to seeing men as the aggressors when it comes to murder, not women. Yet some of history’s most notorious killers have been women. From Countess Erzsebet Bathory, Delphine LaLaurie, Amelia Dyer, Lizzie Borden, and Belle Gunness . . . it often seems impossible to keep up.”

True crime writer Mitzi Szereto is the editor of Women Who Murder: An International Collection of Deadly True Tales (Mango Publishing), a compendium of murderous women written by internationally famous writers such as horror writer Anthony Ferguson, who lives in Australia; Tom Larson, an American mystery writer; and Cathy Pickens, an attorney who writes both true crime and the Blue Ridge Mountain Cozy Mysteries.

The tales they tell, some well-known such as “Ruth Snyder: The Original Femme Fatale” by Claran Conliffe and “On the Courtroom Steps: The Trial of Susan Smith” by Picken and others much more obscure but no less fascinating like “Mona Fandey: The Malaysian Murderer” by Chang Shih Yen and “Anno Biesto, Anno Funesto” by Alish Holland about the brutal slaying of John Charles on Leap Year Day in 2000 in New South Wales, give lie to the saying that women are the gentler sex. Indeed, these women can kill just as violently and wantonly as any man.

In her introduction, Szereto points out that men and women do kill differently and often for different reasons. Poison, at least in the past, often was the murder weapon of choice of women—easier to administer than creeping up and stabbing someone and so much tidier—no blood to clean up. They also kill less frequently and are typically not in it for the thrill of the kill like many male serial killers. Szereto says that many women, particularly those labeled as Black Widows, do so for the money, though that’s not the only reason. Sometimes it’s the only way to get rid of a threatening boyfriend or spouse or because of jealousy, love, and hate.

But kill they do. And in this fascinating read, we learn about 14 women who did.

This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

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Park Avenue Summer

Chicago author Renee Rosen describes her latest novel, Park Avenue Summer as “Mad Men Meets the Devil Wears Prada.”

Chicago-based author Renee Rosen typically writes novels about historic periods and people in Chicago, such as Windy City Blues; White Collar Girl and Dollface.

              But in Park Avenue Summer, her latest novel, which she describes as “Mad Men Meets The Devil Wears Prada,” she takes us to New York City during the era of Helen Gurley Brown, first female editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine and the author of the scandalous ’60s best-seller, Sex and the Single Girl.

Like many of us, Rosen read Cosmo when she was young. Rosen remembers quickly flipping to the “Bedside Astrologer” column.

Author Renee Rosen

“I was looking for guidance on my 16-year-old love life,” she says, noting that all the time she spent poring over the glossy pages of Cosmo essentially shaped her view of female sexuality and female empowerment. “She changed the face of women’s magazines,” she said of Brown.

“Park Avenue Summer” tells the story of Alice (Ali), who moves to New York City after breaking up with her boyfriend and ends up getting her dream job, working for Cosmo.

Like she does for all her books, Rosen threw herself into full research mode, wanting to convey the story through Alice’s eyes.

“I even went down to the Port Authority to get the feel of what Alice would have seen and felt when she arrived,” Rosen says.

Because Rosen had lived on the Upper West side in New York for a year, she knew where Ali, as a single working girl, would live — an area in the East 60s called “the girl’s ghetto.” She walked the streets until she found the exact apartment she had envisioned for Ali.

All in the name of research, she visited Tavern on the Green, 21 Club, St. Regis and the Russian Tearoom, all swank places still in business that were popular back then. But best of all, a friend introduced her to Lois Cahall who had worked for Brown.

“Helen Gurley Brown was like a second mother to Lois,”  Rosen says.

“She and I became good friends, and she vetted the book for me. It was like a gift from the gods, because she knew so much about Brown and Cosmo and that time.”

Rosen is very much an admirer of Brown and what she accomplished.

“She really wanted to help women be their best,” she says. “She wanted them to know that they could get what they want even in what was then a man’s world.”