The Secret of Magic

Rating: 3.75 stars 

Genre: Mystery

Length: 402 pgs

Synopsis: While on a bus traveling through Alabama on his way home from WWII, decorated officer Joe Howard Wilson is ordered, along with the other blacks on the bus, to give up their seats for German POWs. Upset that having fought for the United States in the war hasn't changed attitudes in the American South coupled with disdain for the Nazis he was asked to move for, Wilson refused. The bus continued on its way, but arrived at its destination minus one black soldier. Wilson's body turns up two weeks later.

A few months or a year later (the timeline isn't perfectly clear) a letter shows up at Thurgood Marshall's office with the NAACP. One of the young lawyers, Regina Robichard, is surprised when she recognizes the sender of the letter as the author of one of her favorite books from childhood, The Secret of Magic. The letter urges someone from their office to come down to help with an investigation of Joe Howard's death and Regina convinces Marshall that she should be the one to do it. Thus Regina, a young black woman lawyer from New York City, travels to the Jim Crow South to find a murderer.

Review: There's no magic! Often I'll request books months before their release after seeing them on GoodReads or in BookPage or somewhere and then by the time they come in for me, I've completely forgotten what they were about. That happened in this case. I got this book from the library and it's called The Secret of Magic and there are fairy lights in the trees on the cover, so I assume something fantasy-ish, but instead I got murder. Which is fine - I like murder, but it's a bit like thinking you're going to eat ice cream and then it turns out to be frozen yogurt. Both are good, but my brain wasn't quite ready. So here's your warning: there is no magic in this book.

Other than the whole "no-magic" thing, I actually really enjoyed this book. I loved the character of Regina! She was such an interesting character. Her father had been lynched when she was very young and her mother had turned into kind of a crusader for civil rights, but Regina had never been outside of New York City. When she made her way to a small town in Mississippi, she was completely overwhelmed with the differences between the way the races were treated and how they interacted with each other. She had heard second hand about segregation, but what she didn't expect was how there were black and white people everywhere. In New York City, people of different races stayed in their own neighborhoods and she had never really talked to a white person before. I think my favorite character, however, was Mary Pickett Calhoun. Regina was surprised to get the letter from this famous white author, especially when she reaches Mississippi and find that the lead suspect is the son of a former flame. The murdered man and his father had worked for and Mary Pickett's family for generations, in fact, since before slavery was abolished, so she felt she had to do something to avenge the death, but was also just starting to come to terms with the town's inherent bigotry. All in all, the murder mystery serves as a backdrop to a character study of small town Southern life in the late 1940s and its themes definitely stuck with me after finishing it.

The Cuckoo's Calling

J.K Rowling’s first crime novel, written under pseudonym Robert Galbraith, has its ups and downs, but overall it’s a great read. As Rowling is so adept with details and figuring out how to weave those details into a cohesive conclusion, she is primed to be a master of the crime novel. What seems to bog her down though is the tedium of these details. Often, I just wanted the book to move faster! Towards the end I couldn’t put it down, but the first few hundred pages were a bit slow. Even so, her characters are wonderful. At first I wasn’t sure about Cormoran Strike, private detective, as the main character but he definitely grew on me. However, Robin, Cormoran’s temporary assistant, I have to say is my favorite character. The scenes between her and Cormoran are alternately hilarious and embarrassing. I also like that she’s a strong female protagonist without being uber-feminist. I’m getting rather sick of the unconsciously gorgeous, independent female leads who all end up seeming the same. Robin falls somewhere in the middle, and I think she’s awesome. I just hope she dumps that loser of hers, Matthew.

I don’t really read crime or mystery novels, so I can’t say that I have much to compare The Cuckoo’s Calling to, but it was well-written and I never suspected who the killer actually was. I had my suspicions on one person but was completely wrong. If Rowling writes a second Cormoran Strike novel, which I believe she is, I would definitely read it.

I hunt (and read) killer books

I'm finally back to serial killer and death books. It's been so long and I've missed them. I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga tells the story of Jazz (short for Jasper). A body was discovered in a field just outside of town and Jazz just had to take a look. He makes a habit out of spying on the cops when he hears interesting calls over the police scanner, but this one is different. When he sees one of the policeman hold up an evidence bag containing a single severed finger, Jazz knows that there's a serial killer in town. You see, Jazz is the son of the world most notorious serial killer, Billy Dent, who over the course of his career killed 124 people. This type of death in small Lobo's Nod was sure to cast suspicion on Jazz.

Jazz was afraid of two things in the world, and two things only. One of them was that people thought that his upbringing meant that he was cursed by nature, nurture, and predestination to be a serial killer like his father. The second thing . . . was that they were right.

To the outside world Jazz seems "impressively well adjusted." He has a girlfriend, Connie, and a best friend who's been with him for years, the incredibly loyal hemophiliac Howie. But on the inside Jazz knows he's not normal. He constantly has to remind himself that "People matter. People are real. People matter."

He doesn't want to turn out like Dear Old Dad, but knows that he's irrevocably scarred for life from his experiences from his childhood. His father started coaching him on the basics of how to be a functioning sociopath at a young age. Jasper has also been having terrifying dreams where he can feel himself cutting into human flesh hearing his father say, "Nice job, son. Nice good cut. It's just like chicken." And Jazz can't figure out if it's just a dream or a repressed memory seeing how no one knows what happened to his mother.

Since Jazz knows so much about murder and he wants to prove his innocence (to himself and others), he volunteers his services to the local police.  After all, who better to find a killer than a killer?

As the murders continue, Jazz is the first to recognize the victims as copies of his father's first murders. Someone is trying to recreate Billy Dent's murder spree. As the town is going through the motions by the book, which takes time. Jazz takes it upon himself to try to find the killer, but as he starts examining clues and the deaths more closely he starts losing touch with himself and fears that the killings are all because of him.

Who is the murderer: The police chief who had a mental breakdown after catching Jazz's father? The reporter who would do anything to get back in the spotlight? The new detective who just happens to be from the same town as the first victim?
And what will become of Jazz? Can he hold it together or is he destined to become his father?

Flavia, Flavia, Flavia

Cozy murder mysteries usually aren't my genre, but I absolutely adore the Flavia de Luce series. Flavia is a precocious, eccentric eleven year old growing up in 1950s England. Her greatest passions in life are studying chemistry, particularly poisons, and devising ways to poison her older sisters--Feely (Ophelia) and Daffy (Daphne). Being unusually bright, she has a great talent for worming her way into other people's business, exasperating the local Inspector, and solving murders while bicycling around on a bike she has christened Gladys.

I love her.

The book trailer above captures Flavia rather well, but here are a few more quotes from the first book.

Flavia, on her future book:

“If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.”

Flavia, on being the youngest daughter:

“It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.”

 (Having grown up in a similar "brace of daughters," I can tell you that the dynamics among the sisters are spot on and hilarious in these books.)

Flavia, on self defense:

“I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me: "If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!" 

Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Casanovas were located.

I'd have to think of something else.”

The series so far consists of:
1. Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
2. The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag
3. A Red Herring Without Mustard
4. I Am Half-Sick of Shadows 
5. Speaking From Among the Bones
6. The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (January 2014)

The books are quick reads, but are also wonderful to listen to (the narration in the book trailer above comes directly from the audiobook)! Books 1 through 4 build on each other, but I think they could be read in any order. That changes with book 5, which broke the mold and ended on a major cliff-hanger.

Which brings me to 'The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches'. The point of this entire review.

I was so excited to get an advance copy from NetGalley, I moved it to the top of my reading list. It was an excellent book. But I don't know how to review it in advance without spoiling anything. So, here are some spoiler-free thoughts (after the jump) about the book. Once it has been published, I hope to return with a more detailed review.