Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast, where you’ll discover new mystery books and authors. I’m USA Today bestselling mystery author Sara Rosette. I’m also a bookworm who specializes in the mystery genre. I love sharing my favorite mystery discoveries from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies. This episode is all about Under Lock and Skeleton Key by Gigi Pandian.

Under Lock and Skeleton Key was published in 2021, and it’s book one in the Secret Staircase series. Here’s the blurb.

Blurb

An impossible crime, a family legacy, the intrigue of hidden rooms and secret staircases. After a disastrous accident derails Tempest Raj’s career, and life, she heads back to her childhood home in California to comfort herself with her grandfather’s Indian home-cooked meals. Though she resists, every day brings her closer to the inevitable: working for her father’s company. Secret Staircase Construction specializes in bringing the magic of childhood to all by transforming clients’ homes with sliding bookcases, intricate locks, backyard treehouses, and hidden reading nooks. When Tempest visits her dad’s latest renovation project, a dead body is discovered inside a wall that’s supposedly been sealed for more than a century.

So I edited that just a touch at the end. Not to give anything away because we do no spoilers here at Mystery Books Podcast. Here’s the first line. “Tempest Raj tested the smooth hardwood floor once more.”

Okay, so let’s get into a little bit about the background of the story. The blurb gave you quite a bit of information about it, but I will add a couple more details.

It is set in Hidden Creek, California, which it sounds to me like this is a suburb of San Francisco area. It has the main character, Tempest Raj, and I think she has one of the best, most intriguing jobs for a mystery sleuth, and that is as a magician. Really love that. Her stage name is The Tempest, and she’s known for things kind of being exciting and unusual and maybe just a little bit out of control in her stage magic show. Things have fallen apart in her life. There’s been a horrible incident during her show, and she has returned back to her family home to kind of regroup.

Now she has a very strong family. The characters and relationships are very important in this book. So she’s there and she doesn’t really want to go to work for her dad’s company, but it looks like she may have to do that. She’s going to try and regroup and not do that. But as is often the case with amateur sleuths in traditional mysteries and cozy mysteries, the main character returns home and is pulled back into this world that she left.

Themes and Tropes

So we’ll talk a little bit about the themes. One of the biggest themes in this book is the family and relationships. She has such strong relationships within the book. She has her dad and her grandparents and her best friend. And then she’s got the workers in the Secret Staircase Company. And all of these people have rich back stories, and she really goes into detail about how they are all connected and the different ways that they are connected to her life.

Another theme in this book is magic, which of course makes total sense because she’s a magician. So there’s lots of fun magic tricks and illusions, and that plays out also in the Secret Staircase Construction Company, that it’s all about illusions and things that surprise you. So that’s just woven throughout the book.

Another theme of Under Lock and Skeleton Key is just hidden secrets. There’s locks, keys, secrets, all those kind of mysterious elements that I love.

And there’s also Gothic undertones to the story. There’s a family curse. I won’t give away any details about that, but that is a big part of the story and something Tempest has to wrestle with.

There’s a huge theme of influences from the Golden Age of Mystery. This is an impossible crime. The death that happens that Tempest begins to investigate is a locked room death, which is like a subset of the impossible crime. And these were so popular in the 1920s and 30s; where there were tons of books that had impossible crimes, and locked room mysteries were like a subset of that. And Pandian really delves into that.

So another aspect, another theme of this is blended cultures. So Tempest has a blend of Indian and Irish heritage in her family, and that’s woven throughout the story. That’s part of the mystery. It also shows up in the food that she eats. There’s recipes at the end of this novel. So if you like the foods sound really good to you, you can try your hand at some of the recipes that are in this book.

All right, onto tropes. Now, a lot of these are very similar to the themes, but I’ll go ahead and touch on them just to kind of give you an overview. A lot of the tropes in this also showed up in the themes.

I’ve already talked about the Golden Age influence in this book, the locked room. So that is a trope in mystery fiction. If you enjoy locked room mysteries like the “how could this crime possibly been committed?” then you’ll enjoy this book and you’ll also enjoy the kind of in depth homage to locked room mysteries that Pandian gives us.

We’ve had the trope of returning home. Things have gone terribly wrong for her and she has to return home, and that’s a very common trope in mystery fiction. She has to kind of get back on her feet. Where else is the best place to do that except at home?

Another trope in this is there’s a mystery around a parent’s death. And Tempest’s mother has died, and we don’t know all the details. And as the story goes on, that becomes part of the mystery that she has to unravel.

There’s the family curse, which I mentioned. That’s another trope that’s more, I would say, like a thriller or type of Gothic novel type trope, but it does show up occasionally in mystery fiction.

And then food yet again. Cozy mysteries and traditional mysteries often have elements of food in them. There’s just so much food, so many good recipes in this book.

The Story Behind The Story

So a couple of fun facts about this book. In the acknowledgements, Pandian mentions that she wrote this book, she began writing it in Edinburgh after she had gone through a hard time. And she and her writing group, it sounds like many of them joined her in Edinburgh.

Recommendations

Now if you enjoyed this book, Pandian has written quite a few different series and another one that you might enjoy is the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mysteries, and the first book in that series is called Artifact. And it is more a travel mystery type series, which I personally love. If you enjoy this, you would enjoy the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mysteries and this book has a couple of characters that crossover from that series to this series.

Pandian also mentions several locked room classics, so if you are interested in that, you might want to check out these books that she lists: The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr and Footprints on the Ceiling by Clayton Rawson.

If you are a fan of Agatha Christie, she also wrote several locked room mysteries. So you’ve got The Mysterious Affair at Styles and also Murder in Mesopotamia. So those are just a few. She has plenty more, but those are a couple to start with, if you’re into Agatha Christie.

If you want locked room mysteries from modern authors, you could look for Murder at the Chase, that’s CHASE by Eric Brown. And in that book an author has disappeared from his study, and they’re trying to figure out what happened to him. My own book, Death in a Stately Home is a locked room mystery. And then I haven’t read this one, but it’s definitely on my list because it’s shown up again and again: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders.

And then if you’re looking for a book that sort of has a protagonist with a blended heritage, then I would recommend Dial A for Aunties. The protagonist in that book has a Chinese Indonesian heritage and she’s dealing with the different family expectations that that brings. And it’s not quite a mystery; I would say it’s more campy. But if you enjoy that type of theme of the blended heritage, then you would enjoy Dial A for Aunties.

So my question for you is do you like magic and illusions? And have you read any other books featuring magicians?

You can find me on Instagram at Sara Rosett, no H on Sara, and no E on Rosett. Or leave a comment on the show notes for this episode, which will be under Sararosett.com/Lock. I hope this podcast has let you revisit a book or perhaps helped you discover a new author to try. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I hope it tells a fellow mystery reader. Thanks for listening; I’ll see you next time. Bye.