Ellis Dunaway is an unusual and unlikely detective. A struggling television writer who only took on detective work after inheriting his father’s P.I. firm and Porsche (and nearly destroying them both), he’s a recovering alcoholic with few close connections aside from his former secretary and her troubled teenage son. Just as he’s on the verge of landing a profitable if unfulfilling new TV writing gig, he’s thrown back into the shamus business when Larry Price, a sleazy Hollywood agent (“Only occasionally did he look up from his phone to offer non-sequiturs about ‘Sundance,’ ‘marketing synergy,’ and ‘digital rights management’ without taking the swizzle stick out of his mouth”), is killed right next to him. Ellis’ investigation sends him all over LA—the city is rendered here with obvious love and appreciation even for its seediest corners. Detective stories live or die on the strength of their leads, and Ellis carries the novel wonderfully. Funny, flawed, self-deprecating, and charming, he’s a mess in a way that will make readers want to root for him. Vaughn has crafted a character who stands out from his peers, especially when it comes to his earnestness; Ellis, a modern, relatable spin on classic detective characters, is no jaded, hard-edged flat foot. He’s a guy readers will feel they know and wish the best for who displays some skill at investigative work when he gets into it. The fact that he’s always more interested in getting back to writing for television than in solving murders is a source of humor and pathos that sustains narrative. It doesn’t hurt that he’s surrounded by a substantial but not overwhelming cast of colorful characters who, despite falling into some familiar tropes, each have their own clearly defined quirks and motivations. As the tension and the pace pick up toward the end, the novel never loses the heart and tongue-in-cheek attitude that make it so engaging.

Eight years ago, Tierney Gillespie’s partner in the Dublin Crisis Intervention Squad, Norah Boyce, was gunned down by a vengeful sniper at a gala event. Now, Tierney lives with her husband and young son in a “hoity-toity” Silicon Valley enclave, but the shooting still torments her. Unexpectedly, she gets another chance to be a hero when police discover the body of a young woman beaten to death at a local community pool. Tierney frequents the pool as a form of therapy, and she can’t resist helping peevish Det. Sgt. Howard Sutton solve the case—whether he wants her to or not. Along the way, Tierney juggles a host of other challenges, including raising her bullied kindergartner son, supporting a workaholic husband whose accounting firm represents high-tech firms in a wide-ranging financial scandal, and struggling to ingratiate herself with new friends, largely due to her baking prowess. There’s a lot going on in Kemp’s novel, which explains the expansive cast, but readers may find it arduous at times to remember who’s who. Nevertheless, it all leads to a taut hostage situation in which Tierney, a pregnant Norah lookalike, and the queen bee of kindergarten moms are locked in a bathroom by gun-toting drug dealers—who, disappointingly, are rather late additions to the cast. However, Tierney is an appealingly resolute hero with a big heart and an unwavering moral compass—and it’s hard to resist a novel with a line like “I used to be a hostage negotiator in Ireland for a few years before getting into baking.”

In 1985, Diane Daly, Nikki Barone, and Orla Nevins are in Indiana, playing the roles of Tevye’s daughters in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Being cast in the summer stock production is a major coup for the struggling actresses, and during the run of the show, despite a few jealousies here and there, they form a tight bond. Forty years later, Diane has just returned to her Santa Monica home after a three-day evacuation due to the wildfire in her area. She is lucky—the fire did not quite reach her over-mortgaged property, though everything is covered in ash. She has been considering suicide, but now that she and her house have survived the fire, she decides the idea of killing herself is absurd (“How selfish to take oneself out of the picture when the picture had changed so dramatically”). She calls to check in with Nikki, who is living in Colorado and wondering why she ever agreed to leave New York. As they talk, they realize neither of them has heard from Orla, although Diane has tried to contact her. Concerned, Diane heads off to New York to find her, with Nikki joining her a couple of days later. Butterfield’s narrative toggles back and forth between the past and present. In alternating chapters, she fills in the protagonists’ backstories and experiences (individually and together) through the decades. Set against the backdrop of civil protests, the AIDS epidemic, the World Trade Center attack, and the Covid-19 pandemic, the story is packed with entertainment-world tidbits and references, cultural signifiers, and the music of a country in constant, rapid change. Diane, Nikki, and the quirky, dramatically romantic Orla differ in temperament and lifestyle choices, each following diverging paths as they do battle with life’s personal and professional slings and arrows, yet always managing to overcome periods of separation and even betrayal to reconnect with one another. Butterfield’s acerbic prose provides ample humor and social commentary, adding a joyful ambiance to a narrative occasionally heavy with emotional baggage and tragedy.

In 1877, Mary “May” Cassatt is already making a name for herself in the French art scene, having had some paintings exhibited at the Salon, the establishment arbiter of the art world at the time. She is excited by the work of Edgar Degas, who has rebelled against the Salon and is a founder of the Impressionist movement. They finally meet, and she is enthralled. They become colleagues, then personal friends, and then, seemingly inevitably, lovers. Another strand in the story deals with Mary’s relationships with her family members. The Cassatts, from Philadelphia, are well-off, and her parents and older sister Lydia move to Paris to support Mary (and because they remember France so fondly). Mary is very close to Lydia, her faithful confidant, who lost her fiancé in the Civil War. Many famous real-life artists get cameo roles or mentions, showing Mary’s milieu, and Camille Pissarro gets more than that; as a happy husband and father, he contrasts with the tortured loner Degas, who can be incredibly hurtful. Camille becomes Mary’s other confidant; in fact, he warns her about Degas and is there for her when it all goes wrong. There is no hard historical evidence for this romance, and, of course, neither Mary nor Edgar ever married (this is not alternative history), but Groen is by no means the first to speculate. And Lydia at least did have a love tragically stolen from her. (At one point an exasperated Lydia says, “I wasn’t born with your talent…But I loved a man. I know what it’s like to wake up every morning longing for someone.”) What drives the book is the contrasting dynamics: love versus art, excitement versus serenity, the establishment versus the avant-garde. Love is strong, but is the pull of art stronger? That is the question. The text includes reproductions of artworks—mostly Cassatt’s—throughout.

In 1940, series protagonist Arista Kelly’s forebear, Barry Kelly, is a dog breeder in California. After a neighbor poisons one of his dogs, Barry enacts revenge by killing the man. In turn, the dead man’s wife puts a curse on the Kelly family, using “dark magick.” In the present, a man named Mateo has been hired to work on Arista Kelly’s home. Something catches Mateo’s eye: a suitcase containing “a cache of papers and trinkets.” The papers include instructions for a vision spell; since Mateo’s young son has sight problems, he takes the case home with him. Upon closer inspection, the vision spell proves to be of little use to Mateo, and his possession of the suitcase starts to cause problems. Meanwhile, Arista’s neighbor, a “strong, well-seasoned witch” named Iris, has gone missing. When Arista and her aunt investigate, they find evidence in Iris’ home of the curse that was put on the Kelly family—Iris, it transpires, is the original hexer’s granddaughter, and she is on her own adventure after having been possessed by Arista’s uncle Fergus. There is a lot going on in the narrative as a colorful assortment of characters go about their business: Mateo’s troubles with the suitcase and Iris’ journey home after finding herself in Spokane are merely the beginning of the “rowdy commotion” to come. In this world of multicolored auras, where characters have to worry about being possessed and are also concerned with, say, buying jewelry for a loved one, the reader never knows how events will develop. Dodd’s descriptions can be a little too on the nose; at one point, “a scowl of hatred brim[s] across” the face of a villain. Still, while some elements are predictable, there is a rich world of magic and conflict to explore before the story reaches its conclusion.