Magnus Flyte’s (a pseudonym) City of Dark Magic is a jumble. I don’t mean that it a bad way. I really enjoyed the tangle of spy thriller and supernatural mystery and love story. I genuinely wish that this book was longer. I wanted to stay and learn more about Flyte’s Prague. (And yes, I did spend a lot of time on Wikipedia reading up about Prague and the castles and various historical figures mentioned.)
Our heroine in City of Dark Magic is Sarah Weston, a doctoral candidate who specializes in Beethoven. One day, she gets a letter offering her a job in Prague Castle, cataloging musical scores and related documents. It’s just too good to pass up. But even before she officially accepts the job, Sarah is pulled into more than one mystery. Someone breaks into her apartment and carves a strange symbol on her ceiling. Of course, she takes the job and falls right into the middle of things. On one side, there’s the mystery of her mentor’s strange suicide and rumors of drug use. Then there’s a senator trying to cover her tracks during the Cold War by recovering letters that reveal an affair with a KGB agent while the senator worked for the CIA.
The team behind Magnus Flyte do an absolutely incredible job of juggling both plots without sacrificing something critical. The characters are very well drawn. Sarah, in particular, is a fantastic character. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a woman like her in fiction before. She’s intelligent and ethical, of course, but she has a healthy attitude towards her sexuality that I enjoyed. It wasn’t just that there were racy bits in the book; it was that she recognized that she loved sex and wasn’t afraid or ashamed to fulfill that need. Nico is another great character. This mysterious man clearly knows more than what’s going on than he’s saying, and he knows far more about the minute history of the castle and its former inhabitants than he’s willing to say.
I’m hard pressed to say which plot and mystery I enjoyed more. The Cold War plot with the senator and the letters is gripping, revealing the dark past of Communist Prague. This story alone would have kept me on the edge of my seat. But I think that the even more mysterious plot involving a strange drug that allows the user to see the past, Tycho Brahe, Beethoven, and the seventh Prince Lobkowicz was the more interesting of the two. Flyte brings in a wonderful amount of history (though not enough to bog down the narrative) and drops tantalizing hints about the nature of the drug and time. Characters point out, over and over, that atomic matter only makes up about four percent of the universe. The rest is dark matter and unknown. One of the minor characters, early in the book, suggests that magic might be found in the other 96%.
There are hints at the end of the book that this is the start of the series. I sincerely hope so, because I want to see what shenanigans Sarah and her Max get up to in the next book.