Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Audiobook: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

by Kristen Perrin – (March 26, 2024) Many thanks to @PRHaudio for the free advance copy of this audiobook! This book is one of those really fun mystery novels that beautifully bridges an homage to a classic British mystery while infusing the story with modern sensibilities. 

Sixty years ago, a fortune teller foretold Francis’ death which sent Francis on a six decade odyssey to unravel the truth behind a murder that hadn’t happened yet, her own. Now in her late 70s, Francis has made changes to her will and is assembling those named to be aware of the changes. However, Francis never gets the chance because she’s been murdered. Now it is up to her grand-nice Alice, an aspiring mystery writer, to ferret out the truth while navigating suspicious family members, land developers, and the local police. 

Told in a dual timeline, Aunt Francis and Annie’s stories unfold as Annie uses Francis’ diary from the mid 1960’s to begin to piece together motives. The book does a fantastic job of making readers become fully invested in the characters of both timelines. In the 1960s, young Francis is full of curiosity and fire. In the present, Alice longs to solve this crime as a way of connecting with the great aunt she never had the opportunity to meet. This was both a cozy country British mystery and a really tense mystery. There’s a ticking clock to solve the crime, many suspects, even more secrets, and a victim who’d been working her entire life to solve her own death.