Spirits and Smoke (A Mystic’s Accomplice mystery, 2)
Readers will find it easy to like and connect with Maddie Pastore, the protagonist of this Jazz Age mystery set in Chicago. The young widow of a gangster, Maddie tries to raise her infant son while working as an investigator and shill for Carlotta Romany, a medium who connects grieving clients with their deceased relatives. An odd character comes to one of Carlotta’s seances, asking for information about his brother, Herman Quillen, who died of alcohol poisoning. Maddie questions why a teetotaler would have died in this manner. She comes to believe that Herman stole $100,000 from the mob, and that she and her son will not be safe until she finds and returns the money. When she meets a Chicago Tribune journalist eager for a story about gangland, she teams up with him, posing as his stenographer and then as a reporter. Her curiosity leads her into danger as she crosses paths with gangsters, including Al Capone and Hymie Weiss. She is taken hostage during a bank robbery and later thrown into the freezing Chicago River. Along the way she mixes with two brothers, one an honest policeman and one a suspicious artist, as well as the secretary of a bank who appears to be running the enterprise.
An accomplished writer of historical crime fiction, Mary Miley creates a vivid sense of Chicago in 1924, adding the right amount of detail about geography, transportation, architecture, and corruption, as well as period slang. She paces her story well, adding expected and unexpected surprises. The plot is largely logical, with just an occasional improbability. At the end of the book, several threads remain loose, leading the way for another Maddie Pastore novel.
