Today in books I’ve been meaning to check out, Magic for Liars! The premise of a murder mystery Harry Potter for grown ups sounded interesting and I figured I might as well check it out.
The story follows Ivy, the normal sister who has opted for a life of private investigation. As someone impartial but aware of the magical world, she is brought to the magical academy to figure out what really happened to one of the professors who was found split in two and very dead. Her twin sister who she has a strange-to-estranged relationship with is a teacher at the school and she gets wrapped up in the universe trying to figure out just what happened.
The mystery was pretty easy to solve, as the answer is in a throw away line pretty early on in the story, though the reason why becomes much more interesting. There were a lot of interesting elements in the way the magic and the world functioned, as well as the pasts of the characters that get brought in so that they can be entwined into the core narrative. It was pretty well crafted as a story, even if you don’t care much for the mystery.
But then there’s the characters. Nothing is bad, mind you, but there was a lot that was unnecessary. Ivy gets into a relationship that doesn’t do anything to add to the story, and the two sibling relationships that feature are much more interesting. There’s also a lot of time spent on very obvious red herring characters that I could have done without, but that’s more about the genre conventions of a mystery than anything else.
I did like that there was a lot of Ivy’s bias in the story. It may not have been intentional, but the way some characters were perceived felt very much like it was because of the perspective and not because of what they were actually like. Also, because Ivy doesn’t understand magic, we never get a full explanation of how magic works, which I think worked to the book’s benefit.
Overall, I really enjoyed it! It’s a pretty light read with some good moments for the characters. Ivy was an interesting protagonist, even if she did get a bit stuck in her own head from time to time, and her observational abilities in a world she was unfamiliar with made the story come alive. The mystery component was not my thing, but otherwise I really liked it.