Two years ago, I reviewed Play the Fool, the first mystery featuring Lina Chern’s unlikely mystery-solver, Katie True. I said it was “fun but formulaic,” and I have regretted it ever since. Mysteries are formulaic; genres are formulaic. It was fun. Why couldn’t that have been enough for me?
I don’t know. I guess I was in some weird pretentious mood. The fact of the matter was Play the Fool was fun, and written well, and I was wrong. Fortunately, Chern has written another mystery for her tarot card-reading heroine. In Tricks of Fortune, rumor and reputation go head-to-head as Katie finds herself in the maelstrom surrounding a beloved officer’s death.
Officer Pete is a figurehead in the small Midwestern community, the kind of cop that cements faith in the police always being the good guys. Officer Pete has a special connection to Katie, too: When she was a baby, he saved her life by carrying her from a car wreck to an ambulance that couldn’t get through the traffic in time to treat her. She’s stayed close with him and his family, including his son, Matt. Matt is, of course, distraught. Katie’s friend, Gina, is also upset by the murder—mostly because she’s the prime suspect for it. It’s Gina who drags Katie around trying to clear her name, even as Jamie, the hunky cop from a neighboring jurisdiction, asks for her help with his part of the investigation.
Katie’s only scratched the surface before it becomes clear that Officer Pete didn’t quite live up to his reputation. She’s stonewalled by police on the force, even the ones she knows had bad interactions with Office Pete. Even former officers seem reluctant to talk, despite clear indications they have a story to tell. And when clues do emerge that someone else might have been responsible, the official investigation remains focused on trying to prove that Gina did it. Meanwhile, Katie’s own problems are growing. Besides her sister getting impatient at Katie’s playing detective on top of not growing out of her silly tarot cards, Matt seems to want to be closer than ever. And then, of course, come the warnings for Katie to back off her unofficial investigation—some of which are more gentle than others. As she wades deeper in the much, it becomes clear that Gina is far from the only person Officer Pete crossed as he built his sterling reputation.
Within the mystery genre, quality plotting and pacing is crucial, and Fortune checks those boxes nicely—though, the toe dipped into the fickle waters of a love triangle, of sorts, slowed down the investigation in places. Rather than being simply a vehicle for plot, though, Chern’s writing sings with artful composition and delightful turns of phrase that not only make reading easy but pleasant, too. Multiple times, I found myself pausing to appreciate a particularly nice sentence or evocative description.
But where Chern really shines is in her characterization. Katie is a mess, as we’re both told and easily able to see in her failure to gain much traction in traditional paths to adult success. Yet her strength is in connecting to people, and connecting to them on the level that matters to them—or cuts them deepest. Her almost supernatural ability gets a nice mysticism from the cards she deals, allowing her a framework to talk people through their stories or worries or shame or fear. Best yet, she’s sincere in these connections, the secret sauce that really gets people to open up, and that prompts both Gina and Jamie to do what she can to crack the uncrackable. The vast majority of characters get a bit of a charitable glow-up when seen through Katie’s accepting eyes, which also keeps Fortune from straying into the cynical. Good does eventually come for Katie, a nice bit of positive karma for someone who deserves it.
It wasn’t until the end that I discovered a real-life inspiration for the setup in Fortune, something I hesitate to mention now because foreknowledge would take the teeth out of the eventual reveal. Finding out after meant an outrageous bit of reading after The End, and a reminder that truth really is stranger than fiction. But even knowing the culprit and motive, Fortune‘s central questions stand: Where’s the line between a person and their image? And is it better to let a pleasant lie stand when the truth would hurt so many?
There’s probably a close limit of how many murder investigations Katie True can get roped into without straining credulity too much, but I’ll probably keep reading right up to that point and beyond. And if Chern branches out to new settings and characters, I’ll probably follow along there, too.
Ring Reads 