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Today’s pick brilliantly pairs fantasy with the jazz age before blending it all together in a very clever heist.
Comeuppance Served Cold by Marion Deeds
The first chapter starts with the time of day and a date: November 17, 1929. Seattle, Washington. Each subsequent chapter of the book starts with a date in relation to that first date of November 17th, for example, “October 6, 1929, six weeks before” or “November 14, 1929, three days before.” The chapters are not in chronological order which makes this puzzle a very exciting one to piece together.
So we have Seattle, prohibition, and magic. There are different types of magic such as plant magics and elemental magics. There are also shapeshifters, like werewolves but some people shift into animals other than wolves.
Ambrose Earnshaw is Seattle’s Commissioner of Magi. They are not the Seattle police department though unsurprisingly, they work closely together. The Magi Commission purportedly keeps magic-users in line. Ambrose is a very wealthy man and when we meet him, he is interviewing a handler for his adult daughter, Fiona. The woman he is interviewing is Dolly White, who doesn’t have any magical abilities but she knows her way around potions and she went to a nice finishing school. Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter Fiona frequents a speakeasy owned by a Black woman. Fiona drinks way more than her father would like and she is also addicted to a drug she adds to her alcohol they call “shimmer-shim,” “shim” for short. Fiona is supposed to be married to a fine upstanding young man and she is off galavanting, jazz and gin and so on, so Mr. Earnshaw hires Dolly to keep Fiona in line, off drugs and booze, and definitely away from that speakeasy.
Ambrose Earnshaw has a son as well, Francis. Francis is incredibly creepy and he’s known for assaulting women. The family knows it and pays to keep the victims and the victims’ families quiet. Meanwhile, we have Violet Solomon, who owns Violet’s Hat Shop, the speakeasy that Fiona frequents. Violet’s brother is a shapeshifter and shapeshifters are looked down upon usually but now it seems like shapeshifters in the area are in a lot of danger.
I legitimately had a wonderful time reading this book and it’s a fairly fast read, too!
That’s it for now, book-lovers!
Patricia
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