Frances and her two best friends hear an ominous fortune at the village fair that predicts Frances's murder.

Annie receives a solicitor's letter inviting her to Castle Knoll as Great-Aunt Frances's new sole beneficiary.

Annie travels to Castle Knoll and meets solicitor Walter Gordon, his grandson Oliver, and the hostile Elva.

The group enters Gravesdown Hall, discovers Frances dead behind her desk, and finds rooms filled with murder investigation boards.

Paramedics arrive at the estate; Annie pockets Frances's old journal and spots a rose bouquet with needles instead of thorns.

Annie faints at Dr. Owusu's office after learning the rose bouquet that pricked her fingers contained hemlock.

The will is read aloud: Annie and Saxon have one week to solve Frances's murder or the entire estate will be sold.

An autopsy report reveals Frances was not killed by the flowers but by a lethal injection of iron.

Annie lifts the lid of a storage trunk and discovers a human skeleton wearing a coat with stag buttons.

Annie realizes she is the one who unknowingly shipped Emily Sparrow's body to Frances from the Chelsea basement.

Annie and Detective Crane share dinner reading Frances's journal and confirm Emily Sparrow is Annie's biological grandmother.

Annie wakes in the middle of the night certain she knows who murdered both Emily and Frances.

Joe Leroy shows up at the parking lot instead of Magda and traps Annie inside the closed ambulance.

Joe tries to inject Annie and confesses Rose murdered Emily, and that he killed Frances to protect his mother.

Annie is rescued from the ambulance, explains the full solution to the assembled group, and Mr. Gordon declares her the winner.

Frances's lifelong fear comes true when her great-niece Annie discovers her murdered at Gravesdown Hall. Frances's eccentric will forces Annie into a one-week competition to identify the killer before the estate and the entire town are sold to a developer. Annie uncovers a second mystery when she opens a storage trunk from her own childhood home and finds a decades-old skeleton inside. Reading Frances's teenage journal alongside Detective Crane, Annie learns the skeleton belongs to Emily Sparrow, her biological grandmother, and that Frances was killed because she had finally identified Emily's murderer. Annie sets a trap that draws out the real killer, Joe Leroy, who confesses that his mother Rose murdered Emily and that he poisoned Frances to stop her from exposing the truth. With the case solved, Annie claims her inheritance and delivers justice for both victims.

The central murder mystery from fortune to justice.

Emily buys bird charm necklaces for all three friends after Frances receives the disturbing fortune at the fair.

Frances begins keeping a journal to record clues after Emily vanishes and police start dredging the river.

The teenage friends sneak onto the Gravesdown estate at night and encounter young Saxon Gravesdown spying on them.

Elva tears sticky notes and photographs from Frances's murder investigation board while Frances's body is still in the room.

Rose Leroy, one of Frances's oldest friends, arrives at the manor house and is visibly distraught over Frances's death.

Emily pulls out a revolver and suggests a dangerous game with it, disturbing the entire friend group on the village green.

Saxon tells Annie that only a large-animal veterinarian would possess injectable iron in the lethal quantity found in Frances.

Emily's pregnancy is exposed when Frances yanks her borrowed stag-button coat off Emily in front of the whole group.

Emily sneaks to Frances's window at midnight, confesses her jealousy, and begs Frances to help arrange an adoption.

Miyuki confirms her veterinary clinic was broken into recently and a lethal iron injection was among the items stolen.

An ambulance is called for Rose after she pricks her finger on a rose similar to Frances's bouquet; it is a false alarm.

Frances's brother Peter opens his door holding baby Laura, revealing he already has the child and Emily has relented.

Saxon emerges from Annie's wardrobe, denies trashing her room, and proposes they team up to solve the murder together.

Oliver admits to Annie that he was the one leaving old threatening notes on her bed throughout her stay.

Annie discovers a trunk full of Frances's blank journals and, feeling inspired, begins writing her own account of events.

The story's darker undercurrents begin in the Prologue, where Emily responds to Frances's frightening fortune by distributing bird necklaces, a gesture that ties her fate to the prediction. After Emily vanishes, Frances starts the journal that will eventually solve two murders decades later. In the present, Elva's destructive behavior at the crime scene and Rose's grief at the manor reveal the fierce loyalties Frances inspired in those around her. As Annie digs deeper, she uncovers the medical explanation for the murder weapon and confirms that stolen veterinary supplies are the key to the case. The photo album Rose gives Annie turns out to be the decisive piece of evidence, and Saxon's surprise appearance from the wardrobe forces Annie into an uneasy alliance that she quietly turns to her own advantage. The resolution comes not only in solving the crime but in Annie choosing to put down roots in Castle Knoll and accepting the blank journals Frances left behind as an invitation to begin her own story.

The hidden lives and secrets of Castle Knoll.

Annie brings the needle-laced rose bouquet to Detective Crane and her hands begin to blister from touching the flowers.

Ford Gravesdown places the chess queen in Frances's palm and tells her that her friends do not treat her well.

Saxon hints to Frances during a visit to an abandoned farmhouse that Emily is concealing a pregnancy.

Frances fires the revolver in a panic when Walt turns violent and strikes Emily during the heated confrontation.

Ford comforts a shaken Frances at the manor house while Emily arrives and implies she and Ford have been intimate.

Oliver threatens Archie Foyle over the farm's future; Joe Leroy shoves Oliver and warns him to stay away from his mother's hotel.

Frances finds threatening notes stuffed inside her coat pockets and grows increasingly frightened that someone is coming for her.

Frances watches the Gravesdown car pass her on the road heading toward Chelsea on the night Emily disappears.

Annie and Detective Crane open a locked file drawer after Annie discovers that the fortune's words form the combination.

Annie reasons that Walt Gordon could not be the murderer because his guilt would have required police at the original meeting.

John tells Frances that he and Walt never reached Chelsea that night, and that Ford was not there either.

Frances decides to spend her life hunting Emily's killer, feeling her own kindness and goodness deliberately slipping away.

Annie meets vicar John Oxley and recognizes in his face the same physical features she has always seen in herself.

Frances and Ford share their first kiss at a Christmas party at Gravesdown Hall after months of correspondence.

Annie reveals to the group that the photo album proves it was Rose, not Emily, who was obsessively wearing Frances's clothes.

The turning points of the novel trace how a single ominous fortune warps the lives of everyone it touches. Ford's chess lesson, in which he places the queen in Frances's palm, is the moment the fortune becomes tangible and Frances's obsession begins to take hold. In the past timeline, confrontations and shocking disclosures—Frances firing a gun in panic, Emily hinting at a secret affair with Ford—set the fatal dynamics of the friendship irreversibly in motion. In the present, Annie navigates threats and deceptions, ultimately using the fortune's own words to unlock a hidden drawer and methodically eliminating suspects through careful reasoning. Frances's journal records the moment she chooses to let her kindness slip away in pursuit of justice, while Annie's reading of the photo album finally exposes Rose as the true obsessive in the friendship. Both timelines converge in the final revelation, confirming that obsession—whether Frances's, Rose's, or Joe's—is the force that drove every violent act in the story.