Exhuming Family Skeletons: UNDER LOCK & SKELETON KEY (2022)

Originally posted June 7, 2024.

“The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized all impossible crimes can be summed up in one word: ‘Misdirection.’”

In a genre full of mystery writers-turned-detectives, mystery-readers-turned-detectives, and mystery-actors-turned-detectives, an amateur sleuth who gets into the gig because her family’s construction company builds secret passages was a delightfully funny innovation that immediately drew me to Under Lock & Skeleton Key—the first in Gigi Pandian’s latest series, the Secret Staircase mysteries—which tackles a devious locked room from the perspective of an unusual type of expert.

Tempest Raj is an elite Vegas stage magician (another magician!) living under the cloud of a family curse: the eldest child of each Raj generation is fated to die by magic. The curse claimed Tempest’s aunt Elspeth in a gruesome guillotine magic trick, followed by her mother Emma in a suspicious stage disappearance, and it seems to be coming for Tempest, too, when a show goes disastrously wrong, endangering her and slapping her with a lawsuit. However, Tempest suspects not the curse, but deliberate sabotage her duplicitous stage double Cassidy Sparrow. Nonetheless, the fallout forces her to move back in with her family, who specialize in eccentric construction projects, where she encounters another mystery: an old house whose plans don’t match its actual dimensions, suggesting a hidden room. Investigating this oddity leads Tempest to discover a present-day murder, which pushes her to reconnect with her estranged former best friend Ivy Youngblood.

Got all that?

So, yes, as you may have gleaned, this series is pretty high-concept, and there is a lot of front-loaded backstory information to keep track of as early as the first chapter. I don’t think there would have been any way to simplify it, though, considering that Skeleton Key‘s main mystery ties into both Tempest’s past and what seems to be gearing up for a series-spanning mystery about the Raj family. It’s all relevant, I promise.

Let’s start with the basics. The actual locked room (or “hermetically sealed room,” strictly) makes its appearance in the construction project side of the story. Tempest’s father Darius Mendez has been hired to work on a historical house by single father Calvin Knight, who has just moved to town, transforming a disused pantry into a magical playroom. But while surveying the site, the Secret Staircase crew realize that the house plans have changed from their original dimensions. Specifically, it seems that a part of the pantry was walled off in 1925. To conceal something? A savvy mystery reader may suspect a body, and a historical mystery—and indeed, on opening the wall, a body is found. But the corpse is far from historical. Tempest is shocked to recognize the victim as her nemesis Cassidy! (I told you it would be relevant.)

It’s a tantalizing setup: how on earth did the body of someone that Tempest saw alive only a few months ago make its way into a crawlspace that hasn’t been opened in a century? Given the family vocations, you might wonder about a secret passageway, but that possibility seems to be ruled out quickly. And here we do get a smidge of that “mystery reader” investigative style: Skeleton Key pays its dues to its genre forebears through Tempest (a fan of the Great Merlini, in a meta-nod) and Ivy (a fan of Dr. Fell), who pull a Nine Times Nine by turning to the Locked Room Lecture to figure out how the trick could have been worked without a secret passage. Do they come up with one? Or is there a way that a passage could have been created, after all?

I won’t give anything away, of course, but I will say that the answer to Skeleton Key‘s mystery is an honest and very Carr-ian solution. That said, most of the book is closer to a tone I associate with the “cozy mystery” genre, by way of the Three Investigators books. The protagonist lives in a small town working at an appealing trade or small business (secret passage construction), the emphasis is less on terror and suspense than the interpersonal drama of the town’s large cast (primarily Secret Staircase Construction and their associates), there are lots of breaks for delicious food (Indian-Scottish vegetarian fusion cuisine, with included recipes), and there are a couple of hunky maybe-murderers hanging around as potential love interests for Tempest. Will Tempest get with charismatic new-recruit stonemason Gideon Torres? Or rekindle her relationship with her bowler-hat-wearing magician ex, Sanjay Rai? Or do they have other designs towards our heroine?

“A trick is never just a trick. It’s always a story. Always. That’s the magic that makes an illusion work.”

I seem to recall a scene in one of Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen novels, where Fen has a slightly fourth-wall-breaking speech about how nobody actually believes that the characters in fair-play mystery novels are real people, and he would prefer if we just dispensed with the whole charade. Pandian takes pretty much the exact opposite approach: the story puts a lot of meticulous effort into establishing the large cast as real people with lives, families, personal connections, dreams, cultural backgrounds, partly based on the author’s own life. We spend as much time on the Raj-Mendez family’s history as we do on the investigation. Ivy wants to be more to Tempest than a sidekick, and makes her voice heard when she isn’t feeling appreciated. The protagonists pay attention to the fact that Calvin is a Black man, and getting his family involved in a police investigation could be dangerous. And the plot is intimately connected to Tempest’s personal issues and relationship to her mother (as someone who also has a charm bracelet created by my mom, the fate of Tempest’s was something I felt quite invested in). If you get impatient with mysteries where the characters are obviously just narrative devices, you’ll probably appreciate this, while if you’re more of a Fen, you may find yourself overwhelmed.

Personally I was a bit of both: I liked the cast and the atmosphere, and I liked the mystery, too, but felt like there were a lot of emotional moving parts to keep track of. Despite what Tempest’s family suggests, the “family curse” mystery and Cassidy’s death aren’t directly connected, and the former doesn’t come close to being resolved in this book for the amount of narrative attention it receives. A lot of that, I think, has to do with this being the first book in the series, and simply having a lot to establish. I definitely plan to check out the next instalment. Much like a construction project, after all, any continuing series requires strong groundwork.