An Irregular Casting

The body isn't the problem. The problem is what Mira Ashcroft can see that no one else can. As Thornhallow's Master Auditor, Mira has spent thirty-one years reading magical residue-the invisible fingerprints every spell leaves behind, visible only through her brass lens, Prudence. She is very good at her job. She has never found anything she could not catalogue. Until the morning she arrives for a routine document collection and finds the town's most meticulous enchantment-shop proprietor cold on his shop floor. The Inspector's theory is tidy: an accidental overreach, a practitioner who pushed beyond his license and paid for it. Mira looks through her lens and sees something else entirely-a doubled signature, an illegal Bond technique, and the unmistakable shape of a spell that was erased from the official record thirty years ago. The same year she signed a report she has never quite forgiven herself for. The murder is designed to be invisible. It can only be read by a Master Auditor. There is only one Master Auditor in the province. Mira does not immediately tell the Inspector what she saw. This is not a decision she examines too carefully. It sits in the body very quietly, as if it had always been there. Set in a warmly imagined secondary world where magic is licensed, regulated, and woven into the fabric of daily life-enchanted bakery ovens, weather-gauge calibrations, the meticulous paperwork of the Royal Guild of Licensed Practitioners-An Irregular Casting is a cozy fantasy mystery and fair-play whodunit with every clue on the page. It is a story about a precise, private woman finally opening a box she has kept sealed for thirty-one years, and about the quiet weight of things seen and not reported. For readers of The Thursday Murder Club, Legends & Lattes, and Truly Devious-a locked-room mystery in a world where the locks are made of light.