A mystery where Ivy, a private investigator, has to address a potential murder in a magic school, where her own twin sister Tabitha is a teacher—her sister, who was gifted with magic, while herself wasn’t. That’s a recipe for disaster, or at least, for tense relationships and/or resentment.

And I enjoyed, indeed, the out-of-balance relationship between the two sisters, based on a lot of unsaid things, feelings and resent left to simmer for years, with each contending with a difficult event in a way that made the other sister believe they didn’t care, or not so much. Well, it was especially imbalanced when Ivy was concerned, since she was the one at home when the said event occurred, and had to live through it with the feeling that Tabby was too busy with her studies. But this long-festering resentment also came hand in hand with a wistful, half-buried, never fully admitted, desire for magic as well: Ivy telling herself she’s fine as she is, that she doesn’t want magic, can never really hide the regret that magic separated her from her twin. A good chunk of the story deals with this complicated relationship, as well as with Ivy wondering “what if” (what if she had been magic, too?), and seeing herself as the woman she never was, and that she probably wouldn’t have minded being. Along with her investigation, this leads her to spin more and more lies: some appearing as necessary, to throw the potential culprit off-balance while Ivy is fishing for clues, and some that are, let’s say, less justified, if not by her feelings.

On the other hand, there were times when Ivy came off as wallowing in self-pity a little too much for my liking, and when she became unsympathetic rather than touching. So the character development and relationships were interesting in general, though tedious at those times I mentioned.

The magic itself is not all stars and sparkles, and this makes it more interesting than neat spells and wand-waving. First, it can be pretty gross. Healing spells, for instance, are gruesome and difficult, and only the best mages can attempt them without killing themselves or their patient. And there’s also something twisted and petty to the way some of the students use their magic—one of the things Ivy reflect upon: they could do so much with it… but they’re still teenagers wrapped in their own drama, and so use it in a very self-centred and sometimes mean way.

The mystery part was where I think the novel wasn’t as strong as it could’ve been. The crime itself is one of magic (not a spoiler—you see the discovery of the body in the first chapter), and this, of course, throws additional difficulty in the path of our investigator, since she’s not familiar with spells and with what mages can or can’t do. Which is partly why she needs to do so much fishing. Yet at the same time, I felt that it lacked tension, that Ivy wasn’t as threatened as she could have been. And the clues were either something she stumbled upon (so not exactly screaming “investigation” here), or so subtle that they were really difficult for a reader to spot. Not to mention some parts of the ending. Some things were left unfinished, and while I do enjoy an open ending, here something was missing—some closure when it came to certain characters and facts, who/which were in fact sort of… brushed aside as “that was bad and they did a bad thing and oh it’s the end, bye.”

Conclusion: 3 to 3.5 stars? I quite liked this novel, but it’s a like” and not a “love” here.

Murder mystery at a magical high school... I'm sold. I loved the pace of this book, it kept me intrigued the entire time. I loved the possibilities magic brought to the story. I was able to figure out some of the twists prior to them happening, BUT there was always that little extra where I was still like, WTF? Really enjoyable, would recommend.

This was an interesting read. Ivy is a private investigator. Her twin, Tabitha, is a teacher at a private high school for magic users. Tabitha has magic, Ivy does not. This caused a rift between the sisters when they were younger, and now that they're adults, they still aren't close. When Ivy is hired to investigate the death of a teacher at the school Tabitha works at, Ivy sees this as a chance to maybe get closer to her sister. Is the death a suicide as the police stated, or is it a murder as the headmaster suspects. Is it a student? Another teacher?

This was a quick read, and I overall enjoyed it. The ending felt a bit rushed, but I would definitely read more Ivy Gamble mysteries if more were written.

Read this one because someone compared it to The Rook. We have some magic, a school full of teenagers, and a murder. Lots of drama and secrets and I liked the dark ending. I really liked the world and I would totally read more if this ended up being a series. The book wasn’t as engaging as I thought it would be though. The main character was pretty whiney and I’m not sure if I’m a huge fan of her inner dialogue.

This book won me over, not that I was surprised. A murder mystery set at a magic school with a flawed female protag? Sign me up. Magic for Liars is exceptionally written, with such emotional depth this reader did tear up on a few occasions. The characters really drew me in, and I stuck around for the psychological drama. I found Ivy Gamble immediately likeable and relatable, and loved juicy conflict with the estranged twin sister.

The mystery unraveled at the perfect pacing, so much so that I devoured this fast-paced book in two eager sittings. And unlike other books I’ve read with magic schools that put magic on such a high pedestal (wink, nudge), it was refreshing and super relatable to see it from a non-magic person’s point of view. Magic is messy, and hard, and there are laws and rules, and not always the answer to every problem, especially the real-world issues teens half to face. Another great one, Tor. Loved it!! Can’t wait to pick up the hardcover when it releases.

Magic for Liars is a fun, fast read for those who like fantasy mixed with mystery. I'm always a sucker for reading books with a dark bent when it takes place at a boarding school, or a small liberal arts college in a quaint town. I blame Donna Tartt's The Secret History for this. Anyway, I rate this book 3.5 stars that I'm rounding up to four. I liked the premise of Magic for Liars, but I thought the book was too short with all the sub plots thrown in. It would have been fine without the romance in exchange for more character development. Heck, it even went a little overboard with the "Chosen One" plot line. I think it would have worked just to say some mages are more powerful than others. Don't let this deter you from reading it, though. It was still engaging and I recommend reading it.

Magic for Liars begins with a private investigator sent to a magic academy to solve a mysterious death in the library. It may sound like a game of Clue and it essential is but without the cardboard characters. Ivy Gamble is the private eye who usually investigates cheating husbands, insurance fraud and the like. The local magic academy has a mysterious death that has been classified as an accident using forbidden magic. Ivy is charged with discovering if it is an accident or murder. Ivy reinvents her self at the school putting on a persona that implies that she went to school with her sister, Tabitha Gamble. Tabitha is the instructor for Theoretical Magic at Osthorne Academy. Ivy and Tabitha have strained relationship. Tabitha was gifted with magical abilities and Ivy holds her responsible for not assisting their dying mother with her cancer diagnosis. This is not Hogwarts although there are still teenage problems. The characters are believable. The teens are filled with angst, resentment and anger. Ivy is a flawed individual whom you can not help but like. Several times throughout the book, Ivy almost gives up. She has cast everyone away in her life. She compares herself to teflon. Nothing sticks for her. There is a twist at the end of the mystery. It is like a reveal of the villain on Scooby Doo. Things are not what they seem. I hope the author revisits this character again in the near future.

Ivy and Tabitha are twins without the "twin bond." Tabitha is magic and Ivy is not and it is this difference that has kept them a part. Ivy would tell you that she does not want magic but this is a lie. So while Tabitha goes off to magic school Ivy muddles her way through life with some resentment for her sister. To be fair to Ivy that resentment had much to do with how Tabitha fooled Ivy with magic.

Things become muddied when Ivy, now a Private Investigator, is hired to solve the possible murder of a teacher, Sylvia, at the magic school where her sister Tabitha currently teaches Theoretical Magic. Being a non mage in a place full of mages is difficult for Ivy and at times she feels as if she is going crazy. The magic system in place is very interesting and scary with some of the things characters are able to achieve! I won't say too much more because I don't want to give away surprises. I am a dabbler in mysteries and I failed at solving it myself so for me this was a great read and I would recommend it to others.

There is a lot in the book left unsaid, although the mystery itself concludes, hopefully one day another magical book will come along and fulfill that informational need!

Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Books for an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

2.5 stars -

I'm not quite sure what I just read...I think Gailey was going for something genre-bending here, and while they achieved that, it left me feeling quite disoriented and unsure of whether I liked the book or not. I'm unused to reading detective novels outside of a series, and the combination of a mystery with magic was really intriguing to me. A female PI solving a crime at a magic school?? Count me in! Concept-wise, I give Gailey full points, and I have a feeling there will be a lot of people who really enjoy this book.

For me, it fell pretty flat. There was a lot going on, and unfortunately a lot of it got lost underneath details, side plots, and other stories. I was really there for the story of what happened to the murdered woman, and the relationship between Ivy and her sister but I ended up getting magical theory, a prophecy about a Chosen One, multiple romantic sub-plots, and so. much. teenage. angst. Honestly, this is what sank this book for me - I obviously knew it was set at a school but I was not expecting it to read like an angsty YA mystery, which unfortunately is what I feel I got.

<em>Imagine you're a candle, and your wick is made of glass</em>

I'm honestly not sure where to begin.

This book scraped me raw. To describe it as ironic nior murder mystery Hogwarts, while more or less accurate, is to do such a disservice to the achingly deep psychological drama that Gailey has crafted.

This is the kind of book that when you finish reading it, you don't know what to <em>do</em> with yourself. I mean, I'm going to put myself to bed, because I stayed up waaaaaay too late to finish it because I could. Not. Put it. Down.

But I'm sure you get what I'm saying metaphorically.

What do you get when you mix the styles of Agatha Christie, throwbacks to magical boarding schools à la Harry Potter, but set in California? You get Sarah Gailey's Magic For Liars, a murder mystery set in and around a magical boarding school in central California! I really enjoyed this one, and I knew I would because I enjoyed Gailey's River of Teeth novella duology released by tor.com in the last few years.

Magic For Liars weaves its way in and out of Ivy Gamble's involvement in solving a murder at the school at which her twin sister Tabitha teaches. In the process of solving the whodunnit, Ivy has to face and come to terms with her own nonmagical abilities, something she's been struggling with her entire life. She finds herself imagining the person she is to the person she could have been with magical abilities, and she has the opportunity to see who might have been had she been born with magical abilities.

Tie in this self-discovery and murder with other magical students, rumors of a chosen one, and familial relationship struggles, and Magic For Liars becomes a fully-fledged novel that has lingered with me since I finished it. I really enjoyed the fresh-noir feeling of the writing, the magic system and how gruesome and cruel magic could be, and all of the little references and throwbacks to popular mystery series and Harry Potter.

Like magic, mystery, murder, relationships between sisters, magical theories and conspiracies? Read this delight of a novel. It's out June 4.

Many thanks to Tor for a complimentary review copy! All opinions are my own.

Ivy Gamble has always wanted magic. The real magic. The magic her sister has. Instead of going to a magical high school and practicing spells and charms, she barely graduated normal high school. After her mother’s death, Ivy’s dream of joining the FBI disappeared, just like her relationship with her sister. After years of barely speaking, the sisters are thrown together when Ivy is hired to investigate a murder at Osthorne Academy, a school for magical children and where Ivy’s sister Tabitha, teaches.
Now, faced with a brutal murder, hormonal teenagers, a prophecy, and a new love interest, Ivy struggles to pick out the truths from the sea of lies and deception created by everyone involved.
This was a very twisty and turny mystery that kept me guessing all the way to the last page. Everyone had a secret to hide and some secrets were far more deadly than others. Ivy has her own big secret to keep-she lets everyone assume that she has magic and knows what they’re talking about. But Ivy doesn’t have a clue and this puts at her a significant disadvantage, especially when she catches the eye of a teacher and uses his interest in her to gain more information about the case. Ivy also spends a great deal of time lying to herself-about her own abilities, her own strengths, and her ability to consume bottles and bottles of booze.
Teenagers struggling to find their identity, young love, and emergency contraception played a huge role in this book and I felt it was handled really well. I really appreciated how the author wrote about abortions and how the school nurse was able to administer a magical abortion before a certain time frame and then referred the young women to medical doctors after that time had passed. This wasn’t done to make things more difficult for the young women, it was done to keep them safe and healthy. Amazing how writing about responsible health care feels so progressive.
This was a great magical mystery and I really enjoyed it. I really like fantasy that mixes with our own reality-the fact that magic is real but we don’t discuss with people who aren’t magical. Magic for Liars has the perfect blend of fantasy, mystery, and teenage drama to keep your interest from start to finish.
Full Disclosure Time: I received a free digital copy of this book from Netgalley. Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. All opinions are my own.

Ivy Gamble is a decidedly unmagical private investigator. No frills. No entanglements. Her mother died of cancer, her father checked out emotionally, and her relationship with her twin sister Tabitha is estranged, at best. Tabitha, though, isn't going the Jessica Jones route. Tabitha is magical. She got to go away to study at magical boarding school, and now she's a teacher at one of those schools. She's got the life Ivy always wanted.

But things aren't perfect at Osthorne, and after an unsatisfying external investigation, Ivy's brought in to solve a nasty murder. Complicating things are the hot teacher who doesn't know Ivy's not magic, and...Tabitha, who has more secrets than Ivy suspected.

This is a decided departure for Gailey, whose previous books have involved alternate histories of America, in which domesticated hippoes were a Thing. Those books were great fun, and so is this one. Boarding school murder books are one genre, and magical boarding schools are another, but Gailey mashes them up with glee. HIghly enjoyable.

Magic for Liars is a non-fantasy murder mystery, set in a magical world. The protagonist, Ivy Gamble, is an ordinary PI hired to solve a murder at a very unordinary (read: magical) academy - an academy at which her estranged twin sister, Tabitha, teaches, no less. (It's more Brakebills than Hogwarts, if you were wondering.) Since Ivy has never been magical, as she starts to encounter more and more magic during the course of her investigation, it remains as illusory and mysterious to her as ever. And, because it's written in first person, the magic system is completely alien to us - this is not a Sanderson novel. It's a very non-magical detective story (no revelio charms), wrapped in a fantastical book jacket (even the school graffiti is magic), and that juxtaposition made things very interesting for me, even if it was very frustrating for Ivy. Overall, I quite enjoyed it. The characterization was strongest for Ivy and Tabitha, obviously, but still solid for everyone else. The plot/mystery itself was, well, mysterious, with a twist I didn't see coming. The pacing was good, even if the third act felt a little rushed. If you like mysteries and/or fantasy, I'd definitely recommend it.

Magic for Liars is an intriguing read with a great balance of action and characterization. The plot line is delightfully twisty. The characters are cleverly designed to move the plot forward -- and yet they are still figures that, in most cases, evoke the reader's empathy and caring.

In a world where magic makes the impossible a fact of life, death can come from the most apparently benign sources. An entertaining, engaging read

Thank you NetGalley for the digital ARC of this book.

I found this to be a fast-paced read, complete with magic, murder, and mysteries. The MC has her fair share of issues and makes her journey a bit messy, but for some reason I found myself attracted to her storyline. While the story has some definite plot holes, I think it was a great debut, written really well.

Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey’s debut novel, is one of my favorites of 2019. It stars Ivy Gamble, a down-on-her-luck private investigator. The head of the boarding school her estranged twin sister works at shows up one day and asks Ivy to investigate a death at the school. The police dismissed the death, but the head thinks there’s more to it. This will be a bigger job than Ivy's ever had, the kind she dreams of getting, both in responsibility, a death, (rather than bored 40 year olds having affairs) and in terms of payment, which she desperately needs.

The death aside, there’s reason to be reluctant. The school, the Osthorne Academy for Young Mages, is for students who can do magic. Some people got it, some people don’t—and the PI doesn’t, but her sister does.

After getting two chapters in, I rolled over and told my wife that I was reading a new book that seemed like it was written just for me.

If you’d like to read something that’s a little bit Veronica Mars, a little bit The Magicians, I’d highly recommend Magic for Liars. I greatly enjoyed it. There are a few twists and turns I won’t get into, but as they happened, I FOLLOWED THEM ALL. This doesn’t mean I predicted everything (or even most things), but often when I read books like this, at some point I end up just giving up and going along for the ride knowing that whatever I’ve missed be recapped before the final denouement. Here, I was able to keep up the whole time. Nice work, Sarah Gailey!

I received this book at no cost from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The expectations I had for the book may have led to the 4 stars instead of 5 stars. While it is a murder mystery...the majority of the fiction is dedicated to non-magical and P.I Ivy's past, and the state of her traumatic and complex relationship with her magical twin sister. Estranged from her at a young age, taking this case dredges up unresolved feelings beneath the issues that inform Ivy's life.

Fitting within the P.I mold, Ivy has some... bad habits, particularly alcohol as a coping mechanism. I liked that this trope actually had some heavy bearing on the majority of the fiction. Sometimes it's just a given that a P.I has these coping mechanisms and it's sort of handwaved. Ivy dredges up her own past in a peripheral way when she takes the case at the same magical school her estranged sister goes to. Both never truly dealt with some seriously heavy issues in high school, and they start to reconnect as the investigation proceeds.

There is an unreliable narrator aspect of the story that does a bit too much hand waving for my tastes, though. Ivy doesn't have a very professional approach to the case, in that she inserts herself into some of the people's lives in a way that completely compromises her investigation. It's a trade-off. There's a lot of interesting drama and the writer is fantastic at expressing Ivy's inner thoughts and feelings--and tying them to the unfolding narrative.

My quibbles are small. There was a satisfying ending, it's well written and interesting. But I'm a sucker for magic systems and the title sort of implies there's going to be one? Instead, it's essentially just if you're magic, you "get it"; if you're not magical--you just will not get it. It was very unsatisfying. This, along with the unreliable narrator aspects that hand waves a bit too much, downgraded my rating.

Ultimately I really liked the overall tone that was coupled with a believable sense of honesty that comes with the unreliable narrator aspects. It's very heavy and quite sad. I liked that the expected catharsis that comes along with these types of stories was elegant and, again, quite honest. It's a messy ending and I really liked that about it.

Thank you very much for the Advance Reader Copy of "Magic for Liars" by Sarah Gailey. I did enjoy parts of the book, and I did finish, but this was not the perfect book for me. I do like private detective books with some self loathing, but felt that IVY was a little too self defeating. Also I got kind of bogged down towards the middle for some reason. I do feel that this will be a good book for many readers, particularly women, hopefully that does not come off as mansplaining and or sexism. There were many female characters and I do not have as much insight as a female reader may have. I do follow Ms. Gailey on Twitter, and have a great deal of respect for her and her work.Again, Thank you, and happy reading.

Magic for Liars is Sarah Gailey’s answer to detective noir, murder mysteries, and magical schools, and from the moment I heard of it, it’s been one of my most anticipated books of the year. In anticipation, I’ve spent this year reading all of Gailey’s work that I could get my hands on and, much like their short fiction and novellas, Magic for Liars is cleverly written, darkly humorous, brilliantly insightful, and impossible to put down.

Gailey casts their own spell with the premise alone: private investigator Ivy Gamble gets asked to solve a gruesome murder at Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged and magically gifted twin sister Tabitha teaches. From the moment Ivy takes the case, the story spirals into a character-driven exploration of nuanced sibling relationships, the pressures and expectations of magic, realistic high school drama, and how to heal from and process the difficulties, choices, and traumas of life—magical or otherwise. The narrative carried a heartbreaking emotional weight that I wasn’t always prepared for and yet, at the same time, this was the most fun I’ve had reading a novel this year.

This book takes an obscene amount of my interests and manages to combine them into a beautiful, coherent narrative that feels like it shouldn’t work—but it does. I left this book longing to return to the magic and secrets of Osthorne, despite everything I’d seen, and I’m confident that any reader who picks this up will find something to love about it. I’m already eagerly awaiting whatever Gailey decides to write next and when Magic for Liars releases in June, I’ll already be shoving it into the hands of everyone I know.