DESERT CITY DIVA

A young DJ who wants help finding her birth family hires a detective willing to ride her untrustworthy tales to the truth.

Confined to a hospital bed by a spider bite, Rolly Waters (Black’s Beach Shuffle, 2014, etc.) may not seem to be much of a hero. More than the bite itself, Rolly has been ensnared by the woman who brought it on: Macy Starr, an amateur DJ 20 years his junior. With her dreadlocks, her glowing gold eyes, and her mysterious past growing up on the local Indian reservation, Macy’s more flower child than prima donna. She’s come to Rolly with a guitarlike instrument called a diddley bow that she claims was given to her, along with a golden necklace imprinted with a numeric code, by her unofficial adoptive father, Daddy Joe. She may have just taken the necklace, and even the diddley bow, both of which Daddy Joe had planned to give her when she turned 18, if only she’d stuck around till then. Macy’s more interested in the photo on the back of the diddley bow than the bow itself. Could it be a clue to the identity of her real parents? She wants Rolly to find out, but it’s hard for him to get very far with such an unreliable client. When he does start to find information, it’s next-level gibberish—something about Universal Vibration Technologies, astral vibrations, and solfeggio. How this all fits together requires its own brand of logic, though it makes sense within the story itself, at least for readers who don’t cling too tightly to their earthbound beliefs about reality.

In a world where anything can happen, the most obvious answers are still the right ones, leaving little room for mystery in the plot. The worldbuilding, by contrast, is very mysterious indeed.