The White Magic Five and Dime by Steve Hockensmith and Lisa Falco

[King Bob]

A woman finds out her mother is dead and immediately and correctly assumes she was murdered. Her mother was a con artist, which led to their estrangement, because her mother used her as a tool for her cons. But her mother left her something - a small new age store and tarot reading business in a small town near Sedona. She goes there to try to find her mother's killer, and to try to make amends to her mother's tarot clients, who were being conned. As part of trying to find the killer, she starts learning the tarot so she can sound out her mother's clients, but gradually becomes sincerely interested in it as a too for personal insight. The plot is interspersed with snippets of the tarot book she is reading, and each chapter opens with a picture of one of the major arcana and a short and somewhat snarky gloss on it (also presumably from the book she is reading).

I picked this up on a whim, and it was pretty good. Kept me turning pages. Characters were developed but it didn't go too much into that. The first author wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and the second is a tarot reader. Since I don't read mysteries, I can't say if it was skillfully done, but I failed to suspect the killer, which was a big oversight on my part. I thought the tarot aspect was well done without veering into the occult, and it actually gave me some new insights into some cards. Recommended if you're interested in tarot and mysteries I suppose. First of a trilogy.

[Greg]

Okay. I stopped reading about ten pages in. I might have to give it another shot. It was all very Twee.

[King Bob]

Yes, you could say that. I probably kept going because I thought it was going to be a supernatural mystery, although it wasn't. I liked the tarot aspect. I think they might be spoofing a type of mystery, or someone's style, but I don't read mysteries so that went past me.