Four Torches (Out of Five)
Imagine that you try to save someone’s life, but she ends up dying anyway. Making matters worse, the police think it may be murder, and consider you a person of interest.
Lily Ivory finds herself in this nightmare situation in Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell. This is the first book in a new mystery series called Witchcraft Mystery.
Lily is a witch, and magic is heavily woven into the plot of the book. The added bonus — the “gimmick,” if you will — is that part of the magic is, according to an author’s note, based on interviews with “real life witches.”
Lily feels like an outsider, the result of being a witch. She’s drifted around the world for years, ever since being forced to leave her home town. Now she’s in San Francisco, where she hopes to establish roots. This gets threatened by the mysterious death, particularly when the police start checking her past.
In addition to the mysterious death, she gets involved in investigating the mysterious disappearance of a young girl, apparently the latest in a long line of children who’ve vanished from one neighborhood and never been seen again.
The plot is good. It’s not as neatly-crafted a puzzle as an Agatha Christie novel — although, let’s face it, very few writers reach that standard. But the plot is always interesting, and there is genuine suspense as to how it will turn out.
But what really makes this book, I think, is the character development of Lily. She’s an interesting character, and there’s a sense of depth and history. By the end of the book, I felt I’d only barely gotten to know her (unlike some books that make me feel like I know everything I’ll ever know about their oh-so-simple main character by the end of page two!).
Supporting characters don’t strike me as being quite as deep as Lily, but they are believable and have some depth. The secondary characters who impress me the most are the men. Often, mystery series that star a woman have men who are one dimensional cardboard cutouts who do little more than show up in time to bash the murderer over the head as he threatens the heroine’s life.
The highest compliment I can pay this book is this: I got this book as “light reading” for when I commute on the bus. I started reading it on my way home. When I got home, instead of setting it aside for the next day, I kept reading.
Pick it up. It’s a magically good mystery.
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This reminds me of the series of books written by Silver Ravenwolf (a Witch herself) that started with the novel “Witches Night Out”. They were mystery/suspense novels geared toward teens, written by a witch, about witches.
So, not exactly a new ‘gimmick’ here but still a relative novelty, I suppose.
Intrigued enough to try to find this book, anyway.