Waiting on Wednesday (52)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.  So here's a thing I'm looking forward to: The White Magic Five and Dime, by Lisa Falco and Steve Hockensmith (8 July 2014).

Much to Alanis McLachlan's surprise, her con-woman mother, Barbra, has left her an inheritance - The White Magic Five & Dime, a new-age shop in tiny Berdache, Arizona. Reluctantly traveling to Berdache to claim her new property, Alanis decides to stay and pick up her estranged mother's tarot reading business in an attempt to find out who killed her. With help from a hunky cop and her mother's live-in teenage apprentice, Alanis begins faking her way through bogus tarot readings in order to win the confidence of her mother's clients. But much to her surprise, the more she uses the tarot deck, the more Alanis begins to find real meaning in the cards.

*****

I have a thing for tarot cards. I'd started collecting decks (mostly for their artwork or quirkiness) long before I met my husband, who had about 70 of his own at the time--he's a professional reader, though he doesn't have a regular gig now that he doesn't work the Ren Faire any more. So this premise is interesting to me to start with.

I'm also a fan of one of the authors, Steve Hockensmith, whose cowboy detectives Big Red and Old Red (inspired to take up deducifying by reading about Sherlock Holmes in The Strand) were great fun. So I'll happily take a chance on this new series.

 

Eight of Swords

Warren Ritter is not a typical hero for a murder mystery.  For one thing, "Warren Ritter" isn't his real name, and is only one of several he goes by.  He's been living under the radar for thirty-odd years, ever since his activities as a political radical and leader of the Weather Underground went sour.  These days he doesn't really have to work for a living (one of his identities had the foresight to invest in Microsoft a couple of decades ago), but to keep busy he reads Tarot cards on a street corner in Berkeley, California.  The book gets started when his reading for a random young woman is filled with warnings, and later that same day she is kidnapped.

The author, David Skibbins, has written a second book featuring the same character.  It's also named after a Tarot card: High Priestess.  With 78 cards in a Tarot deck, he's got the possibility of a really long-running series ahead of him; it'll be interesting to see if the character of Warren Ritter/Richard Green/Dave Ellbruck et al. can support such a series.  The character is the best thing about the first book, Eight of Swords; he's not only a fugitive with understandable paranoia issues and a deep distrust of authority, he's also got rapid cycling bipolar disorder.  The supporting characters of his paraplegic hacker love interest and his octogenarian therapist are equally intriguing.

Originally posted at MySpace on 5/23/06