MIDNIGHT MAGIC

Conspiracies, intrigue, murder, deceit, apparitions, dusty secret passages, false identities, a clever investigator, and his loyal if credulous young servant: Avi’s new page-turner has it all. Not long after scholarly old Mangus is forced into renouncing magical powers he never claimed to possess, he is abruptly summoned to the nearby Castello Pergamontio; it seems that Princess Teresina, 10, claims to have seen a ghost. His servant and narrator, Fabrizio, soon discovers that the situation is far from cut-and-dried; the heir, Prince Lorenzo, is gone, perhaps murdered, and the princess is about to be secretly married to sinister Count Scarazoni—unless the superstitious King Claudio calls the wedding off. Mangus, who doesn—t believe in the supernatural, says the ghost is not real, but Fabrizio has no doubt after seeing a gesticulating, weirdly lit figure. Then Teresina’s tutor is found dead. Enmeshing his protagonist in webs of conflicting plots and alliances, Avi brings the suspenseful plot to a climactic boil in which Scarazoni is tricked into confessing that he killed both the tutor and the prince—or tried to, as Lorenzo has been around the whole time, disguised as a kitchen boy. Readers, especially fans of John Bellairs’s books, will be riveted from page one. (Fiction. 11-13)