The mystery genre seems to be a thriving hotbed of stories involving modern Pagans. A quick search through Amazon reveals at least five authors with mystery series set in modern Pagandom: Rosemary Edghill (pen name of eluki bes sahar), M. R. Sellars, Dolores Stewart Riccio, Annette Blair and Madelyn Alt. I read very few mysteries, but I did find and read Edghill’s Bast Mysteries and the first couple of Sellar’s Rowan Gant Investigations shortly after they came out. I believe that Edghill kicked off the subgenre, but if anyone knows of earlier works, I’d love to hear of them.
Today, however, we’ll focus on the first three books of Alt’s Bewitching Mysteries. Alt is still actively producing this series: the most recent book was released in April and the next is scheduled for January. These books are mysteries and so the plot is: someone gets killed and the protagonist figures out whodunit. I shan’t discuss the plots more than tangentially in these reviews. Instead, I am more interested in how Paganism is depicted and how our religion and related issues (like magic) are integrated into the stories.
I am finding Alt’s books absolutely charming. The Bast books were great, but Karen Hightower (Bast) is drifting away from a coven-based tradition towards a faith which is less structured throughout the series. Alt’s Maggie O’Neill, on the other hand, is a small-town Catholic girl slaving at a dehumanizing call-center who, while seeking shelter from a storm, lands ass-first across the threshold of Enchantments, a antique store which includes an occult shop on the second floor. Maggie is quickly hired by the store’s owner Felicity Dow (Liss), an English émigré and Witch (one presumes Gardnarian, but it’s not made explicit in the first three books, though Maggie is reading a quote from Valiente from Liss’ books by p.23). Maggie is clearly a sensitive and is identified as an empath by Liss, and so any important part of the series is Maggie’s discovering Wicca and being drawn to a new faith. The books are, in part, a conversion narrative.
A second reason that I find the series charming is more personal: it is set in a small town of some 6,000 in Northeastern Indiana, and I was born maybe 25 miles away in Kokomo. We moved away when I was seven, but the town’s fixation on basketball and the other details of small-town life all ring true.
The Trouble with Magic is a basic introduction to the town of Stony Mill and more characters than Alt particularly knows what to do with. In addition to Liss and Maggie’s immediate family (one brother and one sister, two nieces, Mom, Dad and Grandpa), the book presents the 29-year old unmarried Maggie with two obvious potential suitors: a strait-laced, probably evangelical police officer, Tom, and the dark, handsome and dangerous (He wears leather! He’s a former military intelligence officer! He makes knives!) Marcus who is probably the High Priest of Liss’ coven. Alt also introduces an entire cast of paranormal investigators, the N.I.G.H.T.S. (Northeastern Indiana Ghost Hunting & Tracking Society) which include the brownie-baking proprietress of a favorite new local eatery, a butch former nun, a tech wiz, and an Amish dowser in addition to Liss and Marcus.
I am tempted to criticize the inclusion of N.I.G.H.T.S. as being a bit extraneous to both the themes of the novels and the plots, but paranormal research has always been a neighbor of modern Paganism. And such material has been successfully incorporated into other novels like Bradley’s gothic novels (Ghostlight, Witchlight, Heartlight and Gravelight). Furthermore, when I searched for the full name of the acronym for this article, I discovered that there seems to be several similar groups in Indiana, and so the group’s appearance in the novel seems to be thoroughly apropos to the setting.
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I found the first three books charming, but I absolutely love the fourth book, No Rest for the Wiccan. The murder mystery is pretty much vestigial in this particular story, and that is not a bad thing at all. At a stretch, there are maybe five suspects in the murder, and you’ll have a fairly clear idea whodunit long before the end. Do not let that fact stop you from buying this book, because this book is the most accurate fictional portrayal of what it is like to be a modern Pagan I have yet read.
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