Tarot card reader extraordinaire Katie True gets embroiled in another local murder when her best friend becomes the prime suspect in this exciting mystery from the Edgar Award-winning author of Play the Fool.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lina Chern’s Tricks of Fortune, which is out July 1st 2025.
Katie is torn. Lieutenant Peterson had saved her life as a child and holds a special place in her past. Even worse, her closest friend Gina—who knows Katie better than she knows herself—is the primary suspect.
As the investigation unfolds, the details surrounding Peterson’s death become increasingly murky, as does Gina’s innocence. All Katie knows is that following her intuition has gotten her this far. But will her trusty tarot deck help her when the truth about the people she loves is too terrible to face?
The day Gina was arrested for murder, we were celebrating one year since I had opened my tarot card reading room.
Technically, it wasn’t “my” reading room. I was using my sister Jessie’s former office at the Lake Terrace Estates outdoor shopping plaza, in return for doing her real-estate ding-dong work.
And it wasn’t really a “reading room,” since I spent more time stapling pictures of Jessie’s face onto other pictures of Jessie’s face than I did reading cards.
Also, I hadn’t “opened” the business myself. Gina had opened it for me.
But hey, one whole year!
Gina surprised me (scared the shit out of me) that day by leaping through the front door with a bundle of takeout bags from Kabob’s Your Uncle, the Mediterranean place next door where everyone was always high.
“You get a lot of walk-ins here?” Gina said. Jessie had pushed hard to put a By appointment only sign on the front door to make my place look more exclusive, like a life-coaching or therapy center, but I had talked her out of it. I wanted to run a place where you walked in and got help when you needed it. No appointments, no forms to fill out. Just come in and get help. Have a cup of tea while you’re at it. Jessie had grumbled but backed off and now the front door read simply Out of the Blue Consultations in a prissy font you would expect to say It’s Wine O’Clock!
“If by walk-in you mean drive by at high speed going somewhere else, then yeah, tons,” I said. “A mom and daughter came in this morning.” The mom had gushed about mom-and-daughter time and then played with her phone through the entire reading.
“Had a bachelorette party last week. Most of my clients come from Jessie, though. She lines up trade shows, art fairs.” I dipped a wedge of pita into the hummus. “I did a corporate team-building seminar. They needed to make some stupid point about the dangers of predictive thinking. They were like, see what she’s doing? Don’t do that.”
Gina attacked a piece of dolma. “Corporate waste is the best.”
“She’s kind of like my business manager,” I said. “Turns out the way to stop hating her for trying to control my life is to put her in a position where that’s her actual job.”
“So she sets up gigs for you and in return you do her shit work?”
“I stuff a mean envelope.” I squashed the tiny seedling of complaint breaking through the dirt in my mind. “She keeps hiring these young whippersnappers who soak her for everything she knows and then ditch her for a competitor.” I jabbed a couple of thumbs at myself. “She needs an assistant with zero interest in real estate, and even less career motivation.”
Gina chewed and nodded. “So, you’re happy?”
I shrugged. “I could still be at the other mall, so, could be worse.” The job I was working when I met Gina was the latest in a string of shitty jobs I’d either gotten fired from or that had otherwise ended in some spectacular humiliation.
Gina whipped a slice of pita at me, hard. It bounced off my forehead and plopped onto the table, upending a cup of tzatziki.
I picked crumbs out of my eye. “What is your problem?”
Gina laced her fingers and waited for me to arrive at a bullshit-free answer to her question.
I moved a plastic knife slowly through the hummus, making waves. I could slide into this vast hummus ocean, I thought, swim away, and live forever on a hummus island where I never had to answer the deceptively simple question of whether or not I was happy.
“It’s good,” I said. “It’s just, dressing up like Madame von Freakshow so I can tell some drunk VP of sales if he’ll score at the hotel bar that night is not what I had in mind. I want to solve a real problem for someone. Something only I can help with. A problem they’ve taken to everyone, that no one knows what to do with.” I felt like an asshole saying this. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Gina—and for Jessie. At least I could call myself a professional tarot card reader. Wasn’t that enough?
“Well.” Gina wrapped the leftover pita in a piece of tinfoil. “I need help.” She smacked her fist on the table. The tzatziki fell over again. “Finish stuffing your face and then read the cards for me.”
“You’re just being nice.”
“You take that back. You think I don’t have problems? My dog died. My husband is cheating on me.”
“You don’t have a dog and you’re not married.”
“More problems. Just don’t do one of those giant readings where you paper the walls with cards and it takes four hours.”
We cleared the table and I slid the cards out of their red velvet bag. I had never read for Gina before. She wasn’t a snob about it, and she was all in favor of me doing what I wanted to do, but she was jittery about letting her guard down and cagey about her past. I only saw the flashes she occasionally showed me, and they rarely came together into any cohesive picture. She was either a tarot card reader’s best dream or their worst nightmare.
“I could teach you to read,” I said, shuffling. Normally I asked the querent to focus on their problem so I could read the clues their body put out while their mind worked. With Gina I had to do the opposite: distract her from anything important so it could sneak out. Chatter, keep things light. “You’d be amazing. You’d be a legend, like that old Puerto Rican dude on TV. People would make you kiss their babies.”
“First of all, gross,” Gina said. “And second of all, I’d have to smack some fools up. People are too goddamn dumb to see what’s right in front of them.”
I shuffled one last time, cut the deck, and drew the first card: the Queen of Wands.
Gina splayed out on the blocky couch, trying to squeeze some comfort out of furniture that refused to give it. “Who’s this?” she said.
I looked at the queen’s pale, angular face. No makeup, no jewelry, no nonsense. Wand at her side, all motivation and organization.
“Someone you worked with,” I said. “A leader. Someone with some pull.”
“A woman?” I watched Gina’s mind whir through the possibilities.
“Not necessarily. It’s someone you don’t see anymore.” Pure speculation. Gina never kept anyone in her life for long. “But someone you still think about.”
Gina’s eyes went soft. I waited for her mind to settle on a target, then hit her again to keep her from thinking too much.
“That’s the point, you know.”
Gina looked up, glassy. “Of what?”
“You’re not meant to see what’s right in front of you. You can’t read a story from the inside. You need a reader.”
Gina grinned. “What if the reader is part of the story?”
“Plot twist.” I picked up the deck. “The reader becomes the read . . . ed? The rad?” I slid out the next card. “The Moon.”
Gina leaned over the card. “This is a big one. Right? One of the big ones? The Major . . .”
“Major Arcana.” The Moon’s face was unreadable and wild, like an animal’s. “The Moon is about hidden things.” A cheap textbook read, no nuance. I was stalling, waiting for a reaction to scroll across her face. “Illusions. Secrets. Hidden danger. Dishonesty.”
Gina snorted. “That’s just Tuesday for me.” Gina did this sort of mercenary informant / detective / PI thing that weaved back and forth over the line of legality and routinely required her to act, lie, pretend, and go after people doing the same, everyone trying to fuck everyone else into slipping up. Licenses? Accreditations? Pshaw. All she had under her belt were a chunk of years as an actual sworn cop and a slew of contacts in law enforcement who relied on her flexible relationship with the law and her otherworldly talent at impersonating shit balls. Basically, she got hired to do stuff real cops and Feds would get in trouble doing themselves. She never lacked for work.
The creepy-crawlies in the Moon card dragged themselves out of the water, reaching for their cool celestial boss. Emerging secrets. That was it—that’s what I was missing. Gina expected secrets, lived them . . . but this was different, this was something she wouldn’t see coming. Something that would knock her out of orbit.
“Whoever this is”—I pointed at the Queen of Wands—“is hiding something that has to do with you. Something you don’t see coming.”
“Ooh!” Gina gave a delighted shiver. “Sounds bad!”
“Cards aren’t good or bad,” I said. “It’s all context.”
Clouds rolled over the pale sun in the corner of the window and everything went blue. I flipped over the next card: The Tower. “Oh, shit,” I said before I could stop myself.
Gina leaned over the card, its pale prison tower like a thin face with three black eyes, enveloped in flames from a bolt of annihilating fortune. Ruined figures twisted through the black air.
“This one looks, how do I say this? Bad.”
I peered into the pitch-black wall of the card. Most cards were organized in layers. You could move and move into the background and keep finding something new, secret mountains and lakes, animals, flowers, meaning after meaning. The Tower had no layers, no background, only darkness.
Click-click-click, the slot machine in my brain rolled up. The story of the three cards fell
into place.
“Someone from your past will reappear,” I said, “with a secret that destroys you.”
Outside, a Lake County Sheriff squad car wheeled, too fast, onto the line between two spaces. A young blond cop in amber aviators hopped out. Two other cops squeezed out of the back.
A flash spiked inside me, like a lightbulb burning out. Even before Sunglasses checked his phone, looked around for my storefront, and tipped the others a nod, I knew they were headed this way.
Here it comes, I wanted to say, the Tower. There was a graphic I had seen during the last solar eclipse, a thin blade of shadow slicing the country diagonally from the southwest. I had wondered then if the people in its path could sense the slow creep of darkness moving toward them.
The bell rang and now the cops were inside. The lead swept his sunglasses off. He was watching himself do it. In his mind, he was the star of a show where people were always sweeping sunglasses on and off.
Gina turned to the door. “Sergeant Kaluza.” Cool voice, blank face. “What a pleasant surprise.”
“It’s Commander, actually,” Kaluza boomed. His voice was too loud for the room.
“Commander, huh?” Gina raised an eyebrow. “What are you commanding these days?”
“The murder investigation of Lieutenant Matthew Peterson.” Kaluza planted his hands on his wide hips. They locked eyes. “You mean, you haven’t heard?”
From the book TRICKS OF FORTUNE by Lina Chern. Copyrights © 2025 by Lina Chern. Published by Bantam, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
