A mystery that understands how easily a performance can become a crime—and how dangerous it is to confuse the two.
A murder staged as an illusion, a haunted theater, and a woman trying to claim her own magic collide in Setton’s novel.
The story is set against Atlantic City’s decaying glamour. Lucy Moon, a magician born into one of America’s most famous magic families, is preparing for a career-defining performance when her co-star, Van, vanishes. Minutes later, the illusion meant to cap the night (the sawing in half of a woman) becomes real in the worst possible way: Van’s body is discovered inside the very box used onstage, transforming a classic magic trick into a crime scene. From that moment, the story moves between the investigation and its aftermath, following Lucy as she navigates grief, shock, and suspicion. The venue itself is central to the plot; the Black Widow Theatre is a historic space layered with wartime memory, corruption, and whispered legends, where performances never quite end and the past refuses to stay buried. (“Despite having only three hundred and thirty-five red-velvet seats, the Widow is grand. Chandeliers drip diamond-lights from an intricately carved sky filled with Nordic gods.”) As the police begin their work, Lucy and her closest ally, Stormie, start their own search for answers, driven by loyalty and the conviction that Van’s death will be misunderstood if left solely to official channels. The narrative steadily expands its circle of suspects and motives. Magicians, casino workers, veterans, journalists, and shadowy figures from Atlantic City’s nightlife drift in and out of focus. Lucy’s background complicates everything—her father’s fame, her aunt’s witchcraft, and her own uneasy relationship with confinement and performance all color the investigation. The plot unfolds with the precision of a stage act built around timing, misdirection, and withheld information without relying on cheap twists or shocks for momentum.
The book’s strongest element lies in how the author uses magic as metaphor. Illusion is not simply entertainment but a system of power—it’s about who controls the story, who disappears, and whose body is placed at risk. Lucy’s fear of the sawing box is symbolic of a long tradition in which women are locked inside spaces designed by men, expected to emerge unharmed and smiling. As she reflects early on, “But lock me in the box and saw me in half, and I’ll scream bloody murder.” That line echoes throughout the story, reframing the hoary illusion as an act of enforced silence. Rather than treating the supernatural as spectacle, Setton uses hauntings to explore unresolved ideas of violence and inherited pain. Ghosts and intuitions function less as plot devices than as manifestations of memory, insisting that what happened before still matters. The city itself becomes complicit, its casinos and boardwalks masking exploitation beneath neon and nostalgia. Stylistically, the prose is confident and atmospheric, grounded in tactile detail and sharp dialogue. The pacing balances urgency with emotional weight, allowing grief and anger to surface without slowing the narrative drive. Observations about gender, performance, and risk are woven into the story rather than announced, giving the book its quiet bite.
A mystery that understands how easily a performance can become a crime—and how dangerous it is to confuse the two.Pub Date: March 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781917788038
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Black Spring Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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