Dutton
April 28, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
In the third entry in the Castle Knoll Files series, Annie Adams gets a call from her mother, a renowned artist who is working on a new series of paintings, abstracts that evoke the mysteries of the anatomical human heart – resonant with a prediction made by a fortune teller that Annie has been mulling over. Her mother is rattled. Something gruesome has been left on the front steps; did a cat leave the remains of its prey there, or is it a message of some kind? Annie travels to London to look at her mother’s new paintings and see whether the icky thing on the front steps is reason to worry. Its threatening message soon becomes clear when Annie finds the body of her mother’s apprentice lying in a skip atop a pile of paintings, a gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be.
Annie’s present day story unfolds in parallel to the experiences of her now-deceased Aunt Frances, who moved to London in 1968 to attend university and be part of the lively social scene. She is befriended by a fellow student who introduces her to Vera Huntington, an “annoyingly cool” socialite. Vera is the sister of Max, who has cribbed from Annie’s notes in class and seethes when he’s caught out. While Vera offers a ticket to London’s swinging clubs and concerts, Max proves to be a dangerous enemy.
The two story lines twist and circle one another and both involve murders that seem to be somehow related. In both timelines, Annie and Frances work through the available clues aided by men with whom they are in complicated relationships that are ambiguously romantic. Another complication comes from Annie’s ne’er-do-well father weaseling his way into her life; she had been raised by her mother after he had scammed her of the considerable fortune her first art exhibit had made. What mischief is he up to now?
It’s all cleverly complex as murders are solved and the puzzling fortune’s meaning is worked out, with a revelation in the end that predicts a future episode for Frances and Annie. While it’s possible to read this mystery as a stand-alone, the series-long arc of character development is most rewarding when starting from the beginning.