THE UNICORN AGENDA

In Culbertson’s thriller, a private eye’s latest case turns deadly—and supernatural.

When PI Mickey Holmes (no relation to Sherlock) gets a new client—famous hedge fund administrator Alexander Stuyvesant—he hopes that it means that he’s finally made it into the big leagues of his profession. The case appears straightforward enough, involving an allegedly cheating wife and a potential divorce with millions of dollars on the line. But the more Mickey looks into Samantha Stuyvesant’s life, the less sure he is about her husband’s goals with the investigation. When people connected to the case start getting murdered, Mickey becomes a suspect, and he realizes that everybody around him has their own agenda—including a unicorn named Mel. Mickey, as it happens, has always been able to see supposedly mythical creatures, including gnomes, pixies, and, yes, unicorns. He’d always thought that they were hallucinations, but as he delves deeper into this case, he finds that Samantha, Alexander, and Mel all have very real connections to a piece of land that doubles as a unicorn breeding ground. It’s up to Mickey to prove his innocence, find the killer, and help Mel—and if he can do so with gnomes, pixies, and the odd troll backing him up, so much the better. Along the way, he hopes to locate Jessica, his missing friend and occasional assistant investigator. Culbertson deftly navigates well-known tropes in this slightly predictable but fun supernatural detective noir fiction. Mickey’s narrative voice has a lightness to it that feels like a breath of fresh air in a milieu that traditionally tends toward the hard-boiled: “Who knew what else besides a gnome might be lurking in all the surrounding foliage? Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to vegetate amongst the vegetation.” The protagonist’s connections to his allies and friends all feel genuine, and the secondary characters that surround him are well drawn. This book is a stand-alone, but Mickey’s adventures have a lot of potential as a series.

A breezy, genre-blending mystery.