But her investigation at Osthorne will bring her back into Tabitha’s orbit, now with over a decade of silence and distance between them.

It is Ivy’s first murder case, and, as a talented by under-utilized private investigator, she’s eager to take it. When Ivy is tapped by the headmaster of the nearby wizarding boarding school, the Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, to investigate a grisly murder, it’s an offer she can’t refuse–and one that will bring the unspoken injuries of her past back to haunt her. The answer is a painfully human protagonist, who struggles with alcohol and a simmering depression, as well as unresolved and lingering grief, barely articulated, from her mother’s death. For fans of magical boarding schools as a genre, Magic for Liars seems to answer: What would have happened to Petunia Dursley if she were left behind and decided to become a private investigator instead of a nosy homemaker? They have since been estranged as Tabitha went to study magic and left Ivy to her normal, non-magical life and ailing mother. She knows that it exists because her twin sister was discovered to be magical when they were children. The existence of magic itself is considered pretty nebulous in Ivy’s day to day life. For one thing, Ivy is an adult–a private investigator who works outside the world of magic and has, in fact, never been a part of it.

But Magic for Liars is not quite like other books about magic. With protagonist Ivy Gamble, the reader gets a taste of how Jessica Jones might fit in at Hogwarts, and in fact, Gailey slyly references the most famous school of witchcraft and wizardry to locate their novel among its forebears. Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars is a fantastical multi-genre detective novel.

Magic for liars book