Locked room

Gigi Pandian: The Raven Thief

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Tempest Raj returns for an impossible mystery in The Raven Thief, the second in Gigi Pandian’s Secret Staircase series. A stage magician, Tempest is living in her childhood home after a scandalous debacle involving her career. A natural storyteller, Tempest is now working at her father’s construction company making sure their fantastic creations have a solid narrative, too. She is in the process of planning her final show throughout the book, and has barely started to consider it when Secret Staircase Construction’s latest client invites her to a séance. read more

Gigi Pandian: Under Lock and Skeleton Key

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This first novel in a new series from Gigi Pandian is so rich, so stuffed with character, plot and setting, it takes a moment to absorb everything the intelligent Pandian is throwing at you.  She expects you, the reader, to hit the ground running.  Her main character, Tempest Raj, is a magician and illusionist whose career has been crushed by a spectacular failure onstage in Las Vegas, and she’s back home reconsidering her life.

She’s from a family of magicians and illusionists, and there’s a longstanding family curse: the eldest child dies by magic.  Tempest has lost a string of relatives, most recently her beloved aunt and her mother (who were known as “The Selkie Sisters”), and Tempest’s grandparents and her father are extra careful of her as they don’t want her to be next. read more

James R. Benn: The Red Horse

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This book will be published September 1.

James R. Benn continues to explore all the nooks and crannies of the mystery genre, keeping things fresh even in book 15 of this long lived and now beloved series.  Main series character Billy Boyle started as a beat cop in Boston, learning the “job” from his father and uncles, who get him a (supposedly) soft wartime post with “Uncle Ike”.  As any reader of this series knows, Billy becomes an investigator, finding the smaller crimes within the larger confines of WWII.  Sometimes the war is front and center but Benn is always a meticulously detailed pure mystery writer, making his books a real pleasure to read. read more