The eldest child dies by magic.

Tempest Raj came close to fulfilling the prophecy that has haunted her family when a trick went badly wrong during her Vegas show and she almost drowned. While she survived, her career didn’t – and Tempest was convinced that her former stage double Cassidy Sparrow sabotaged her act. She could never prove it, so she has returned home, where her father’s company, Secret Staircase Construction, transforms houses with secret passages and the like.

As Tempest begins to consider a career with the company, she escorts her father to a job – and promptly discovers a body sealed up in a room, a room that hasn’t been disturbed for over fifty years. One slight problem – the body is that of Cassidy Sparrow…

I’ve been sitting on this for ages – after bemoaning the fact that it was available in the US but not the UK, I managed to get hold of a copy… and then forgot to read it. To be honest, I’m still not sure that it’s available properly in the UK, or if the copies on Amazon are imports. Anyway, it certainly should be available over here. Any book that includes a paragraph where someone explains the difference between a locked room mystery and a closed circle mystery should be read by everyone (and certain people over and over again…)

I’ve read a couple of Gigi’s books before – The Cambodian Curse (short stories) and The Glass Thief, both featuring Jaya Jones as the protagonist – and this is set in the same universe, so to speak. Tempest, although with a different surname, was in one of the short stories and Sanjay, the so-called Hindi Houdini, was there too. He has a supporting role in this one, but this is very much Tempest’s story.

Someone opined recently that a detective story should not be about the detective – I see no problem in reading about someone’s life if it a) is interesting, b) doesn’t distract from the mystery and c) ideally links into the mystery itself. That’s certainly the case here, as we deal with Tempest finding her place in the world while trying to work out how it all fits into the family curse and whether she was the intended victim or not.

It’s a hugely entertaining read and while it embraces the classic mystery genre, with plenty of name and title dropping, especially a certain Mr Carr and Dr Fell, it has a style of its own, similar to Gigi’s other books, and does feel to an extent like an episode in an ongoing series. Not that this isn’t a complete novel in its own right, but certain themes are clearly set to continue.

The impossible crime is well done – slightly unbelievable that… no, that’s a spoiler, but very clever. The identity of the murderer suffered from one of my bugbears of mystery writing, but it says an awful lot about the book that I didn’t particularly care, as I enjoyed it tremendously.

As I said, the book is out in the US and is available on ebook at least in the UK, as is the follow-up, The Raven Thief. And you can rest assured, I’ll be reading that soon.