Was it an accident? Or was it part of the family curse that took her own mother away from her? While she figures out her next steps, she helps her father out with the family business named Secret Staircase Construction that makes those long sought after hidden doors and rooms for people.
She’s back at her family home, defeated and embarrassed after she nearly died from one of her tricks going wrong. It’s the first book in the Secret Staircase series featuring Tempest Raj, a magician in a family of magicians. She’s also a fan of the works of Clayton Rawson, the author behind the Great Merlini, a magician who solved impossible crimes in several novels and short stories, written in the 1930s and 1940s. She alludes to him in both of her Secret Staircase novels and in at least one of her short stories. Pandian is a big fan of locked room mysteries, particularly the Golden age author John Dickson Carr, who not only wrote several locked room mysteries, but philosophized on different types of locked room murder mysteries. She is the daughter of cultural anthropologists from Southern India and New Mexico, and traveled extensively with her parents as worked on their research. To put it in her own words from my 2022 interview with her: “I feel like what I’m trying to do is bring classic mysteries into the 21st century.” Her works draw on classic detective stories, but adds into the stories multicultural characters based on her life. Was Tempest the intended victim? How did Cassidy’s body get into that wall? Tempest feels that this is all the result of misdirection, a technique used by magicians like herself, but how? This “Secret Staircase” series starter is a fresh and magical locked-room mystery filled with fascinating and likable characters, incredible settings, and Tempest’s grandfather’s homecooked Indian meals (recipes included).For fans of murder mysteries and adventure novels, you’ve got to read the works by Gigi Pandian. While visiting her father’s latest construction job, a wall that supposedly was untouched for a century reveals Cassidy’s dead body to Tempest and the rest of the crew. She hails from a long line of stage magicians but doesn’t believe in the curse that is said to fall on the eldest child in each generation-she believes that her show was sabotaged by her former stage double, Cassidy. Tempest Raj returns to California after her popular magic show in Vegas came to an early and disastrous end. This latest from Pandian ( The Glass Thief) is an excellent choice to liven up cozy mystery sections.
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