Of course I love a good private detective mystery, or a police procedural that’s well written with a good cast of characters and a good plot. But sometimes I also enjoy reading a mystery that steps outside the ordinary bounds of the classic mystery, and this week we have two new ones that fill the bill.
The first is Play the Fool, by Lina Chern. The protagonist is Katie, a young adult who’s going through a rough patch in her life which forces her to move back closer to her overbearing parents (are there any other kinds of parents in these books?) and take a series of underwhelming jobs to support herself, checking her tarot deck from time to time for guidance. Then she meets Marley, a mysterious but charming young woman who encourages her to be herself and to use her talents for soothsaying, and for a brief time everything seems to be going in the right direction. Until Marley is killed, and Katie NEEDS to find out who did it and why, regardless of the potential dangers to herself. Katie is an intriguing character, and her use of Tarot to help her find the answers is a little out of the ordinary in mysteries.
If you’re more interested in historical mysteries, check out Lost in Paris, by Betty Webb. It has in common with Play the Fool a young woman who has fallen on hard times, but Zoe Barlow, in this book, starts with a worse situation: her father committed suicide, she destroyed her reputation, her stepmother has kicked her out in Paris, where she has no connections. It’s 1922 and she doesn’t have a lot of options, or so it seems. Four years later, she’s established herself as an artist among the other artists and writers of the so called Lost Generation, and among her friends is Hadley Hemingway, married to the writer, Ernest Hemingway. When Hadley loses a valise containing all of her husband’s writings, Zoe of course wants to help track the valise down, but when people start getting murdered during her investigation, Zoe realizes she might be involved in something more dangerous than she thought. For the setting and famous characters alone, Lost in Paris should be an entertaining different kind of mystery.
Bookskill 