Thanks to Dutton for the ARC — all opinions are my own and, in this case, very enthusiastic.

If you’ve been following Annie Adams since she first inherited her Great Aunt Frances’s fortune — and her cabinets full of secrets — you already know that Castle Knoll is not a place where mysteries stay buried for long. And if you haven’t started this series yet, well. I’m a little jealous of you because you get to read all three back-to-back.

How to Cheat Your Own Death picks up with Annie still settling into her new life, still carrying the weight of the undelivered fortune she received at the end of How to Seal Your Own Fate — the one that belongs to her. That fortune hasn’t stopped nagging at her. But when a heart turns up on her mother’s doorstep in London, Annie has more pressing things to worry about.

What follows is the dual-timeline mystery Kristen Perrin does so well: the present-day investigation braided with Frances’s meticulously kept journals from the late 1960s. Annie keeps finding that the past has more to say than anyone realized, and watching those threads slowly pull together is genuinely satisfying.

This is my favorite book of the series so far, and I think it comes down to character. Throughout the series, each character reveals more depth and layers as the stories unfold, mirroring a true-to-life feeling of meeting and getting to know someone.

I was very excited for the complimentary ARC and the opportunity to read How to Cheat Your Own Death early, but it makes the wait for another Castle Knoll mystery all the harder.