Years ago I stopped myself from reading series books back to back. It always ended with things I’d been really enjoying becoming stale and repetitive. However we live in weird times and I needed some stability and something to look forward to on a walk with an audiobook and DI Edgar Stephens and his magician friend Max Mephisto have kind of become my lockdown companions. A little soap opera that I am enjoying keeping going with. And maybe an audiobook is a different kind of repetitive to reading on the page anyway, hearing the words is soothing in a way that

This one concerns the disappearance of a couple of young teens just before Christmas 1951. I liked the new characters introduced here; a “lady policeman” (as the children in the book refer to her) is a good addition to the cast. Griffiths is good at characters and I thought that the children were especially well written.

I feel that mysteries that can be solved by a combo of a detective and a magician ought to be rather limited, though that kind of thing never stops dozens of other series. I have glimpsed that this series advances through time at a quick pace so perhaps it’ll all seem quite reasonable. I’m planning on sticking with it at any rate.