A Midnight Puzzle is mostly a cozy mystery with the main investigator being a disgraced professional magician who came home to work at the family construction company which specializes in things like hidden doors/staircases and other sort of magic themed set ups. As with most mystery series, this one has both the first murder (and a related disappearance), as well as a longer running one which is always in the background. Tempest, her family, and friends are all fun characters with their own quirks who are al great together and often by themselves. Even Moriarty, Tempest’s mysterious not-quite-nemesis/stalker/companion is an interesting figure who is clearly kind of bad, but also it’s unclear whose side he’s really on, since he always seems to be trying to help Tempest, or at least keep her out of the worst trouble.
This time, the murder is basically someone no body likes, but Julian was a client of Tempest’s family company who was threatening to sue them for no real reason, which means the family are sort of suspects. Especially since Julian was killed by what looks like a booby-trap involving a sword through a door. Julian’s wife is in a coma, supposedly from an accident caused by shoddy construction. As one might expect, Tempest has to clear the family name (again). Things actually get interesting when the Raj family curse (the eldest dies by magic) and the deaths of Tempest’s aunt and mother, which are the long running mystery that Tempest struggles with come up. There is another death at the theatre Tempest rented, and somehow the rumor starts going around that it was done by the ghost of Tempest’s mother, who was last seen in that theatre. The final thread is that Nicodemus, Tempest’s mentor, is also intown, and gets involved in things too. It’s a lot to keep track of, and I admit, by the end, I think I lost track of why the eventually revealed killer of Julian killed him. Turns out, there’s a connection between the current and the long case, and quite a few answers finally do get revealed. The big reveal though was a tad unfair; personally, it bugs me when the killer turns out to be someone you don’t really have a chance of considering based on what the story gives you, both here and so far in the series. The other things that started getting to me a little was that there was too much “I figured out the killer, and I shall out them during a magic stage show”; it happens more than once. Ok, maybe one more little bug: the flashbacks. The information they provide is necessary for setting up some discoveries, but the narrative voice, present tense, third person, from character perspective, just aggravates me, especially since in most cases, we already know how things are going to turn out.
Now that the big mystery is kind of cleared, I’m interested to see what direction Tempest and co.’s story goes in; the afterward said there are more mysteries to come, but now I’m hoping that the hints of romance don’t take over; they work so far because they aren’t the focus. Paying attention and really getting into the “which option will {insert detective here] finally commit to” always ruins the mystery team story. We’ll see.