I had so much fun with Annie as she tried to solve the murder of her great aunt that I jumped at the chance to hang out with her for another murder investigation or three.
There are a lot of murders in this book. I’ll try to remember the all.
First up is Peony Lane, the woman who made the prophecy that Frances would be murdered, which led to the sequence of events in the first book.
This time it’s Peony Lane herself who ends up dead in Annie’s own greenhouse while Annie’s best friend is visiting from London.
As if it weren’t bad enough for a murder to take place in your own home, it’s also determined that Annie was just a few feet away at the time of the murder, though I find it hard to believe she wouldn’t have heard anything.
I should back up, though. Just a few hours before she was murdered, Peony Lane (for some reason I feel like I can only use her full name) ran into Annie on the grounds of Castle Knoll and advised Annie to look into the murder of Olivia Gravesdown, Frances’s sister-in-law who may or may not have been trying to leave an abusive relationship. Also, she should start by talking to her groundskeeper, Archie Foyle
Peony Lane also tells Annie she has a prophecy for her, but she won’t reveal it unless Annie asks for it.
What kind of a mindfuck is that? That would have sent me into an endless spiral of weighing the pros and cons of asking for the prophecy about me before the old lady kicks the bucket — a spiral that no doubt would have driven me as crazy as poor Frances was driven by her prophecy.
Speaking of Frances, she gets a whole other sidequest in this story that I did not see coming and I’m not sure how to feel about it.
At some point she apparently broke up with Ford and married Archie Foyle!!!
That would explain why, when Annie visits Archie, she finds a bunch of her aunt’s journals that he hasn’t shared with her. As she investigates Peony Lane’s murder and the much older case of Olivia Gravesdown’s death (which may or may not have been accidental), Annie is increasingly anxious to get her hands on the journals, knowing they probably have information vital to the case.
Archie is strongly averse to handing them over, but he won’t say why. When Annie discovers a marriage certificate legitimizing the union of Aunt Frances and Archie Foyle, she figures he doesn’t want her reading journals that might have personal information about him and his brief relationship with Frances.
He does, eventually, hand them over, but the reader doesn’t have to wait until Annie gets her hands on them to read passages from Great Aunt Frances’s journals about how she ran off with Archie, determined to ignore her prophecy and forge her own future.
It sounds great, until it turns out her vision of her future isn’t Archie’s vision of their future together.
Frances wants to apply to college and see the world.
Archie is happy right where he is and doesn’t understand why Frances isn’t.
Eventually, she realizes they’re too different and breaks off the relationship. It’s not clear whether they ever get a divorce or just agree to pretend none of it ever happened. So Frances might have been committing bigamy with Ford for all those years.
Before getting maybe-not-divorced, Frances and Archie investigate the car crash that killed Olivia Gravesdown, her husband, Edmund, and her father-in-law, Lord Harry.
It turns out that Edmund was a serial rapist who liked drugging beautiful young women so he could have his way with them.
The possibility is raised that Olivia found out about her husband’s crimes and threatened to expose them, leaving them no choice but to kill her.
Instead, it turns out she was less of a Melinda Gates and more of a Ghislaine Maxwell.
In fact, it was Archie and his brother, Eric, who discovered and tried to put a stop to the crimes.
Eric worked as Edmund’s driver, which, on the one hand, was a good job for a guy whose parents often had a hard time paying the bills. On the other hand, it quickly led him down a dark road as he got more and more entangled in Edmund’s dark deeds.
Things finally came to a head when Archie walked in on the wrong conversation and Edmund and Olivia took him for a drive to drown him in the river. Olivia holds a knife to his throat, but he manages to hit her her with a rock, knocking her unconscious, and run off.
Edmund puts Olivia’s unconscious body in the trunk of the car, and when a fourth person stumbles onto the scene, they’re forced into the car.
Turns out that person was Birdy, but we don’t find that out until later.
Birdy managed to grab the wheel of the car and force it into a tree. When she wakes, she finds the Gravesdowns dead and Olivia’s body in the road.
Turns out Eric had arrived just in time to finish off the Gravesdowns and make it look like an accident.
Of course, this all gets revealed in bits and pieces throughout the course of the book. In the meantime, Samantha, the receptionist at the local police station, is found dead in the trunk of the infamous purple Bentley, which just happens to be on Archie’s property when the body is found. Of course he’s a suspect, but of course he didn’t kill anyone.
It turns out Eric killed her because she was getting too close to figuring out the truth behind the Gravesdowns deaths. He had also killed Peony Lane for the same reason, and Birdy, who was in love with Eric, framed Annie for the murder to try to protect Eric.
When all is revealed, Eric takes full responsibility for the deaths of the Gravesdowns, Peony Lane, and Samantha.
But there’s another book in the series I get to read! Yay!
So, if you’ll remember at the end of the first book, Annie’s mother warned that her deadbeat father might turn up because he has a tendency to do that sort of thing when there’s money to be had.
So, he does turn up, but not for Annie. He sets about wooing Annie’s mother back … and succeeds!
Annie is incredulous that her mother would fall for his BS again. She tries to be happy for her mom while making it clear she wants nothing to do with her father.
But is that even possible…?