How to Seal Your Own Fate

Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams narrates from Gravesdown Hall, a sprawling estate in the village of Castle Knoll. She inherited the property and a fortune of roughly forty million pounds after solving the murder of her Great Aunt Frances the previous summer. Frances spent her life fearing the violent death predicted for her in 1965 by a fortune-teller named Peony Lane, and her will stipulated that whoever solved her murder would inherit everything. Annie now lives alone on the estate, struggling to fit in among locals who view her with suspicion, partly because Frances kept extensive secret files on their private lives.

A prologue establishes two time periods. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Ellen Jones was arrested for vandalizing the purple Bentley of Edmund Gravesdown, eldest son of Castle Knoll's leading landowning family, at a petrol station. She and Eric Foyle, a local youth and brother of Archie Foyle, smashed windows and battered the car, but Ellen also severed a cable under the engine she believed would disable it permanently. Eric fled; Ellen took the blame and, at the prison register, wrote a new name: Peony Lane. In the present day, an elderly Peony walks into Castle Knoll as a derelict pub collapses, exposing the wreck of that same Bentley, hidden for decades. Peony realizes she made a mistake about a fortune she told long ago and changes course.

On a November morning, Peony finds Annie in the woods and tells her to investigate the death of Olivia Gravesdown, Edmund's wife, who died alongside Edmund and his father Lord Harry in the 1961 crash. Peony suspects Olivia was murdered and urges Annie to visit Archie Foyle, Frances's former gardener and neighbor, at nearby Foyle Farms. Before vanishing, Peony says that "Frances taught me a thing or two about cheating fate" (17).

The narrative alternates between Annie's present-day investigation and entries from Frances's 1967 diary. In those entries, eighteen-year-old Frances teams up with Archie, who reveals that Peony's real name is Ellen Jones and that she severed the brake cable on Edmund's Bentley. The car was repaired but crashed a week later. Eric, Archie's estranged brother, later tells Frances that Edmund was a serial predator who drugged and assaulted women; Peony had been sabotaging his car for months to keep him from driving off with victims. The woman they rescued on the day of the vandalism was Birdy Sparrow, Emily Sparrow's older sister. Peony confessed to Eric that she cut the brake cable by mistake, intending to sever the fuel line.

In the present, Annie visits Foyle Farms, where an ornate dagger with ruby settings is pulled from Archie's waterwheel. She spots diaries on his shelf matching Frances's missing journals from 1967 to 1972; Archie claims they are farm ledgers. He shares the fortune Peony once gave him: a riddling prophecy about a "bringer of death" and figures called "the foil, the arrow, the rat, the sparrow" (50).

Annie's best friend Jenny arrives at Gravesdown Hall. While eating lunch in the solarium, an attached Victorian hothouse, they discover Peony Lane's body face down among the plants, the ruby-handled dagger protruding from her back. Annie recognizes the knife as the one she placed in the kitchen sink half an hour earlier. The police arrive, led by Chief Inspector Toby Marks. A folded paper in Peony's hand turns out to be Archie's fortune with "MINE" scrawled across it. Detective Rowan Crane, Annie's ally, takes Peony's file from Frances's collection as evidence.

Frances's diary traces her bond with Archie as they analyze a crash scene photo. Frances spots inconsistencies: tire marks show the car turned toward the tree rather than away, and scratches around the boot (trunk) suggest someone tried to open it after the crash. She theorizes Olivia grabbed the wheel, survived the impact, and tried to open the boot before collapsing. In the present, Saxon Gravesdown, Edmund and Olivia's son, offers a different theory: Olivia was already dead before the car left the estate, her body locked in the boot.

Annie discovers a blind spot in her front-door security camera that was exploited on the morning of the murder. At Peony's house in the village of Crownell, she finds a hidden marriage certificate: Frances married Archie Foyle around March 1967. Frances's diary confirms the impulsive wedding. Archie proposed with a gold ring set with a ruby, but when they stopped at Peony's house afterward, Birdy recognized it as Olivia Gravesdown's wedding ring, a Foyle family heirloom caught in a generations-old dispute. The discovery triggered a confrontation. Archie confessed that as a teenager he was lured to Gravesdown Hall by Olivia, forced into the Bentley, and driven to the Foyle farmhouse, where the Gravesdowns threatened to drown him. Olivia held a knife to his throat, and he struck her with a rock in self-defense. Edmund ordered them to put her unconscious body in the boot. A fourth person at the farmhouse was forced into the back seat and told Archie to run. That person jerked the wheel during the drive, but the car hit a tree instead of landing in a ditch. She woke to find the Gravesdowns dead, Olivia's body in the road, and the boot open.

A second body surfaces: Samantha, the police station receptionist, is found dead in the boot of the wrecked Bentley on Archie's farm. Archie confesses to Annie that he found Samantha's body and hid it to protect his family, then gives Annie Peony's file and Frances's yellow diary. Annie reviews the security footage and realizes the person who appeared to be Beth, Archie's adopted granddaughter making her regular delivery, was actually Annie's mother, Laura, identifiable by her key ring and paint-stained fingernails. Laura, encouraged by Birdy, came to retrieve the Peony Lane file. Saxon provides another key detail: as a child, he witnessed his uncle Ford Gravesdown slipping sedatives into Edmund's flask to incapacitate him before calling police. When Edmund drove off, Ford chased him. Frances's diary obscured Ford's involvement to protect the man she later married.

When police move to arrest Annie based on planted evidence, she and Jenny flee. Birdy is waiting with a car. Annie deduces that Birdy, not Peony, was the fourth passenger in the Bentley; Peony was at Gravesdown Hall babysitting young Saxon that night. Birdy jerked the wheel but did not kill the Gravesdowns. Eric Foyle did. After Archie ran for help, Eric sprinted to the crash site, killed the injured survivors with a fallen branch, opened the boot, and killed Olivia. Ford arrived moments later, saw what Eric had done, and covered for him out of guilt over the drugged flask, using Edmund's car keys as leverage over Eric for decades.

Birdy's erratic driving clips Eric on the road, but everyone survives. In the hospital, Eric confesses to murdering the three Gravesdowns, Peony Lane, and Samantha. When the pub collapse exposed the Bentley, Peony recognized Edmund's keys on Eric's key ring and realized he had killed the Gravesdowns. Eric killed Peony through the unlocked solarium door. Birdy, who had been hiding in the house after Laura let her in, later staged the scene by inserting the dagger into Peony's body to obscure evidence linking Eric to the crime. Eric poisoned Samantha after she found the keys in his car and began connecting the evidence. He framed Annie with fake harassment complaints and planted forensic evidence, driven by resentment that Gravesdown money was entangling his family.

Frances's final diary entries reveal that she and Archie quietly divorced; their visions were incompatible. Months later, Frances reconnected with Ford, who encouraged her to fill notebooks, planting the seed for her life's work of collecting secrets.

Annie hosts a Christmas party in the renovated solarium. Eric is arrested. Archie agrees to return Frances's remaining diaries. Annie reflects that Frances was a collector of secrets while she is a solver of crimes. Alone after the party, she reaches into her coat pocket and finds the fortune envelopes she took from Peony's house. She pulls one out. It bears her own name. The novel ends with Annie holding her unread fortune.