Magic Dark and Strange

Catherine Daly works at a newspaper as a typesetter, but at night her boss, Mr. Ainsworth, sends her to perform the Farewell Service, a service offered by the paper in conjunction with the obituaries it prints. For an additional price, Catherine can awaken a recently deceased loved one for a single hour. This ability comes with a price; for every hour Catherine awakens the dead, her own life shortens by an hour. One night, instead of sending Catherine on a routine trip to the cemetery to enliven a corpse for a grieving family member, Mr. Ainsworth tasks her with digging up the unmarked grave of a long dead coffin maker to search for an enchanted watch that is rumored to have the ability to permanently bring back the dead.

Catherine accepts this unusual job from Mr. Ainsworth and enlists the help of her friend Guy Nolan, the son of a watchmaker who is also rumored to be capable of enchantment himself and of selling literal segments of time. Guy accompanies Catherine to the unmarked cemetery plot, and, when they dig it up, they don’t find the watch, but they do find the decomposed corpse of the coffin maker who comes back to life before their eyes. This former corpse turns out to be a teen like Catherine and Guy, and, while he has no memory of his former life, he does know that he was murdered. Catherine and Guy name their new friend Owen, and the three of them set out to find the enchanted watch and solve the mystery of Owen’s murder. Soon more murders occur, and the three of them realize they are not the only ones after this watch and that their competition will kill to find it.

At its core, Magic Dark and Strange is a straightforward mystery novel with a few supernatural elements thrown in. The snippets of magic in the book are intriguing but underdeveloped. Catherine can wake the dead, and Guy has his own special ability to stop time. Both abilities exact a cost on the wielder, giving the use of magic an element of danger. Beyond this, the book shares very little about this magic or how it operates in the wider world of the novel. The reader is not given a sense of how common it is to be able to work magic or the variety of enchantments that exist. The lack of detail on how magic fits into the world made the characters and setting feel underdeveloped. The novel also gets off to a slow start. Catherine, Guy, and Owen revisit the cemetery several times to search for the watch and make almost no progress. It’s not until the last third of the book that the plot picks up and they start to make progress investigating the murders and finding the watch. Despite these weaknesses, Magic Dark and Strange> is a suspenseful mystery novel with likable characters.