A Criminal Magic Is an Intoxicating Urban Fantasy

This alternate 1920s fantasy pours a tall glass of the seedy, pulsing electricity of the Jazz Age, but this time, America’s underbelly is populated by more than just drunkards, floozies, ne’er-do-wells, and mobsters—though there are plenty of them, too. The targets of Kelly’s 18th Amendment are magic, those who harness its power, and its byproduct, spell-made “shine.”
Framing this atmosphere of gritty, glamorous woe are two young magicians from far-apart sides of the tracks. Hardscrabble Joan Kendrick is trying to keep her family afloat after the death of her mother and her uncle’s subsequent descent into his own shine. She’s tormented by the magic that lives inside her, but when a mysterious city slicker named Gunn comes sniffing around to recruit her uncle to his magical troupe, she’s forced to take him up on the offer instead. Not only must she come to terms with her magic, she needs to quickly develop her nascent skills enough to outwit and outflash other magicians in a race to please Gunn.
Meanwhile, Alex Danfrey is running from his own past. His father went to jail for moonshining and never revealed it was Alex, not he, who was the magician producing the elixir. Since then, Alex has joined the Prohibition Unit in Washington, D.C., to cover up his tracks or atone for his misdeeds—or a little of both. The problem? His boss knows his secret, and blackmails him into an undercover job gathering intel on an infamous city cartel, the Shaw Gang.

Over the course of alternating point-of-view chapters, Alex and Joan’s sticky predicaments collide head-on, and the dichotomy of their trajectories is one of the most intriguing aspects of Kelly’s sophomore outing (following last year’s couldn’t-be-more-different City of Savages). On one hand, you have an innocent’s descent into darkness for all the right reasons, and on the other, you have a guilty man forced to find his way toward the light in all the wrong ways. Their attraction to each other is as intoxicating as the sorcerer’s shine that swirls around every facet of their shared world.
“Magic can achieve a lot of things, but it can’t undo the past,” Joan sagely opines in her opening line, and that’s what these star-crossed lovers discover as they delve deeper into their respective missions. The farther Joan pushes herself into darker parts of her magic, the more she comes to enjoy and rely on her own power—nearly as much as she longs to secure her family’s future. For Alex, all roads lead to “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” territory. Both must make hard, rash, and sometimes selfish decisions. Both are all the more believable for it.
A Criminal Magic dips its toes into the urban fantasy, alternate history, and magical realism subgenres, but ultimately, any fan of a solid, versatile fantasy will find something to enjoy. Like the gangsters that populate her shine-soaked speakeasies, readers will be entranced by Kelly’s magic tricks.