The Sorcerer’s Appendix: A Brothers Grimm Mystery

Bestseller Brackston’s comic mystery series set in a Grimm fairy tales version of 18th-century Bavaria hits its stride with this often hilarious fourth entry (after 2016’s The Case of the Fickle Mermaid). In this imagined world, Gretel works as an investigator for hire, though her insights aren’t always profound; she tells a prospective client, Evalina Arnold, that “it is facts that will solve this case, as they have solved many others.” Evalina’s sorcerer husband, Ernst, has died, but she has been unable to collect on his insurance policy. The only trace of him is his appendix, which Evalina found in his workshop, but which the insurers insist only shows that one of his tricks went wrong. Gretel interviews a number of Ernst’s disappointed clients in an effort to identify who may have wanted to kill him. The wry humor is a delight (a wolf threatening Gretel “had evidently never been attacked by a fierce Bavarian detective with a flaming Bavarian hat and had not a notion of how to defend itself”). Agent: Kate Hordern, Kate Hordern Literary Agency. (Nov.)