In “The Houseboat,” Dane Bahr’s debut novel, Minneapolis-based Detective Edward Ness is called to a crime scene in the tiny Mississippi River town of Oscar, Iowa: A young girl was found at the roadside, naked and bruised, and her boyfriend has disappeared. Oscar’s sheriff of more than 20 years, Amos Fielding, has never seen a crime like this, hence the request for assistance from city-slicker Detective Ness.
But Ness comes laden with his own baggage. Seven years earlier, he lost his wife and child and has never quite recovered. His drinking is the least of it, really; he’s lost in his grief and memories, barely keeping his head above water with his work, with occasional glimmers of his potential progress.
In Bellingham-based author Dean Bahr’s debut novel, “The Houseboat,” a Minneapolis detective heads to the small town of Oscar, Iowa to investigate a strange crime: a young girl was found at the roadside, naked and bruised, and her boyfriend has disappeared. (Courtesy of Tøren Bahr)
When Ness arrives in Oscar, it becomes apparent that the entire town already has a perpetrator in mind, and Rigby Sellers, a serious loner — apart from his queasy activities with a clutch of manipulatable manikins — quickly becomes the target of the law officials. His tale, horrific and revealing, is told even more completely than that of Ness, tangibly positioning the two men as semi-natural opposites.
Oscar and its surrounding area is the type of country where the amount of rain indelibly impacts the quality of life. The dark underside of the story, set in 1960, is both graphic and grisly, juxtaposed startlingly and effectively with the deceptive veneer of the town’s social and public face: a place of good people, lightly bandied gossip and delicious pies. Bahr, a Minnesota-born, Bellingham-based writer, has a terrifically sure hand with the broader brushstrokes of his writerly painting — the landscape and light, the elemental weather, the birds and plants that detail the novel’s setting — and his compelling characters carry the story relentlessly along.
Different time, different place: Prohibition-era Seattle — infused with an invigorating element of magic — comes to engaging, vivid life in Marion Deeds’ “Comeuppance Served Cold.” In the opening pages, Dolly White, a young woman with gentle but highly effective powers of persuasion, is hired by the pompous Ambrose Earnshaw, Seattle’s Commissioner of Magi, to manage his wayward daughter, Fiona, in the weeks leading up to Fiona’s arranged marriage. But as well as being Fiona’s handler, Dolly finds she needs to manage Francis, Fiona’s somewhat sinister brother.
Deeds’ Seattle is inhabited by shape-shifters — whose safest existence is to lay very, very low; “greengrocers” trafficking in herbs, elixirs and potions; and a stringent (read: corrupt as all get-out) multi-caste community of those who police the city’s magic-wielding population (“We’re responsible for the licensing of magical practitioners and the collecting of fees,” as Ambrose explains to Dolly).
In “Under Lock & Skeleton Key,” the first in a new series by the bestselling, award-winning author Gigi Pandian, a disgraced magician named Tempest Raj returns home to lick her wounds. When a corpse turns up who happens to be not just Tempest’s doppelgänger but also her professional nemesis, things take a chilling turn. (Photo by Susan Parman)
But Deeds has more than a magic-immersed narrative up her sleeve: “Comeuppance Served Cold” is a fun historical-fantasy romp, yes, but also contains a canny, cleverly-plotted heist novel in its cheeky soul. From its delightful, sometimes mind-bending details — eavesdropping “earshot gems,” an addictive drug known as shimmer-shim, affinity locks, invisibility-cloaking abilities, protective tattoos — to the characters who range from truly villainous villains to slightly gray-shaded heroes, to the enjoyable tour of the mean streets of Seattle, Deeds’ writerly sleights of hand are a perfect match for Dolly’s adventures.
Meanwhile, stage magicians’ magic tricks are the order of the day in “Under Lock & Skeleton Key,” the first in a new series by bestselling, award-winning author Gigi Pandian. When disgraced magician Tempest Raj, aka “The Tempest,” returns home to lick her wounds, her dad, Darius, welcomes her into assisting with his Secret Staircase Construction company, a business that specializes in building hidden rooms, cozy reading nooks, and grandfather-clock doors that lead to secret gardens.
The company was originally started by Tempest’s dad, a carpenter, and her mom, a stage magician (yes, magic tricks anchor this family’s Scottish-Indian tree), but Darius has been handling the business on his own since his wife’s disappearance and suspected death five years earlier. When a corpse turns up who happens to be not just Tempest’s doppelgänger but also her professional nemesis, things take a decidedly chilling turn. Does someone want Tempest dead? Is she about to fall victim to her family’s reputed curse? (The oldest child, apparently, always dies by magic.)
As danger stalks Tempest, she finds refuge in a wondrous treehouse inhabited by her grandparents, Ashok Raj and Morag Ferguson-Raj, and doesn’t go hungry thanks to delicious-sounding feasts whipped up by Ashok. She’s also ably assisted by her longtime buddy and recent frenemy, Ivy, who uses her pink puffy vest as a security blanket and knows the cases of Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, Encyclopedia Brown and John Dickson Carr’s “Gideon Fell” by heart. In an enchanting novel rife with illusions, tricks and other magicians’ tools — there’s also a rabbit named Abracadabra and the coolest charm bracelet ever — Pandian casts the best spell of all: a fun and funny page-turner.
