RILEY DARE

A slightly magical escape room, a kidnapping, and a tarot-reading ghost set the stage for this fast-paced middle-grade whodunit.

Twelve-year-old Riley Dare lives above the escape room she runs with her Aunt Hayley. Riley loves mysteries, tarot, Dungeons & Dragons, and fine-tuning the escape room’s puzzles, but what most people don’t know is that her best special effects come from real magic. Riley has only recently discovered her modest powers, and since she’s never known her parents, she still doesn’t understand where her magic comes from. Other than Aunt Hayley, only her best friends, Mateo and Kayla, know the truth. Things spiral during the launch of a new escape room when famous mystery author Richard Rillardson vanishes midgame while Riley watches via a video monitor. Stranger still, Riley starts seeing a ghost. As she and her friends investigate the disappearance and haunting, Riley’s powers grow stronger, and ghostly tarot card messages begin pointing her toward answers. Riley makes for a compelling protagonist as a nerdy D&D-loving sleuth, although the supporting characters feel less developed. The mystery delivers plenty of adventure and magical intrigue, though the escape room premise feels like a missed opportunity to weave puzzle-solving into the plot. Still, the cliffhanger ending leaves an enticing thread dangling for the second book in the series. Riley is cued white, and Mateo and Kayla are brown-skinned.

A fun, gently spooky mystery.