The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery)

A reformed con woman discovers she has a talent for tarot card reading (and amateur crime-solving) when she investigates the death of her mother -- an unreformed con woman who scammed the gullible by posing as a psychic.

When thirtysomething Chicago telemarketer ALANIS McLACHLAN is told that her estranged mother, BARBRA, is dead, her knee-jerk response is “Who killed her?” The answer: “We don’t know.”

It’s no joke. Her mother has been murdered. And much to Alanis’s surprise, she left her daughter an inheritance. Alanis is now the not-so-proud and entirely confused owner of the White Magic Five & Dime, an occult shop in tiny Berdache, Arizona. Alanis reluctantly agrees to come to Berdache to straighten out her mother’s affairs. She knows there will much to straighten out: Barbra was a con artist, and the shop, Alanis assumes, was merely a front for her latest scams.

When she gets to Berdache, Alanis picks up the keys to the store from Barbra’s slightly seedy lawyer, who also mentions that Barbra’s will was only a few weeks old. She gets some grudging help from CLARICE, the black teenager Barbra had apparently taken in some years before. Alanis isn’t surprised to learn her mother had a young partner. A flashback chapter reveals that, once upon a time -- back when her name was “Sophie Harper” -- Alanis was involved in her mom’s con jobs, too.

Of course, she’s not the only one trying to solve the murder. There’s also hunky cop JOSH LOGAN. When he drops by to question Alanis, the two hit it off. A cagy courtship begins, with each trying to wheedle information out of the other between quips.

 Though she tried to give up crime after running away from her mother years before, Alanis remembers the principles of the con game. In fact, that’s what’s kept her alive all these years: She’s never fit into the straight world and keeps ending up in shady jobs that call on her talent for manipulation and deception. It’s exactly those skills she’s going to use now. So she sets out to find her mother’s killer by, in effect, replacing her. She’s going to worm her way into her mother’s clients’ confidence by doing tarot readings.

A funny thing happens, though. The more she fakes her way through bogus readings, the more she finds that what she sees in the cards actually makes sense to her. In the end, Alanis decides to stay in Berdache with Clarice and keep the White Magic Five & Dime open. Perhaps Barbra willed the shop to her as a trap, perhaps it was her way of making amends for being such a lousy mom. Alanis accepts that she’ll never know which. Barbra was full of surprises to the very end: It turns out that Infinite Roads to Knowing, the tarot guide Alanis has been reading (and which we’ve been quoting at the beginning of each chapter), was written by Barbra herself.

Life remains full of mysteries, but Alanis finally feels she has a grip on what’s important. She likes it in Berdache and she likes her sister and she likes reading tarot cards and she likes helping people. And best of all: For the first time in her life, she likes herself.