In 1965 a fortune teller told seventeen-year-old Frances Adams that she would one day be murdered, and Frances spent the next sixty years taking the warning extremely seriously. She became the busybody of Castle Knoll as a form of insurance, filing dirt on everyone she met in case one of them turned out to be her killer. When she is found dead in her library, her great-niece Annie, a young aspiring mystery writer who has never met her, discovers that the will sets a challenge. Whoever solves the murder within a week inherits the fortune, and if nobody does, it goes to an unpleasant property developer. Perrin alternates between Frances’s youth in the 1960s and Annie’s increasingly dangerous investigation in the present. Publishers Weekly places the result somewhere between Agatha Christie, Anthony Horowitz and Midsomer Murders, which is a fair address for a village mystery with a will this mischievous.
