The premise sounds great: non-magical private investigator hired to investigate a murder in a Hogwarts-ish school of magic. Ivy Gamble, PI, sister to the very talented magic teacher Tabitha Gamble, is brought in when the "official" investigation of the murder declares it to be a self-inflicted accident. The rest of the book follows Ivy's efforts to solve a magical murder in a magic high school without knowing the first thing about magic herself.

This sounds like it could be an intriguing book and indeed it could have been. It almost was, it's still fairly readable, but Ivy makes so many ridiculous and inexplicable decisions, and suddenly knows about magic at exactly the critical times despite supposedly knowing nothing about it the rest of the time, that I was half expecting her to be revealed to have been a suppressed magic prodigy all these years. But no, it just doesn't make sense.

There are some fun observations - like, that high school students are self-absorbed, shallow high school students whether they are magical or not - and some interesting characters (though also quite a lot of unlikable ones). Ultimately though the ending fell flat and felt like the wrong decision for Ivy, and there were far too many contrivances carrying bits of the plot along. There were some great opportunities here for more world-building or even more commentary on social imbalances and the magical vs mundane worlds, but none of them were taken. So, overall, while it was an entertaining read for a couple of hours, I'll probably have forgotten everything about it by next week.