DEATH IN THE CARDS

In tarot, Death is the card of change, and that’s exactly what a Chicago teen faces.

Seventeen-year-old Danika Dizon, a queer Filipino American high school junior, is eager to follow in her private investigator mom’s footsteps. But since her mom doesn’t pay for the hours she spends working behind the desk at the detective agency, Danika reads tarot cards at school as a way to make some cash. When classmate Gaby Delgado, who’s Colombian and Irish, confronts her about her older sister Eli’s recent reading and subsequent disappearance, Danika responsibly brings Gaby and her parents to her mom’s agency. Now Danika is on her first official case, which follows many expected genre beats: covertly questioning Eli’s close friends and ex-boyfriend, evading a potential threat, and infiltrating school clubs and a country club in search of information. In her YA debut, Manansala spins a great mystery that’s filled with atmosphere. The various cultural elements, from Filipino family dynamics and martial arts (for Danika, Kali “is a way of life”) to the art of tarot, are lovingly represented, and the practice of reading tarot cards is made accessible for readers who may be less familiar with it. The investigation chugs along steadily, but dangers are treated with an appropriate level of severity, and the teen characters largely avoid serious harm.

A well-paced and intriguing mystery.