Book review: A Study in Slaughter

Schooled in Magic, book 3

In Schooled in Magic, Emily was dragged from our world into a realm of magic.

Meanwhile, during her summer vacation, Emily prevented a royal coup and the overthrow of an entire kingdom, and became promoted to a baroness.

Now she’s back at school … only to become the target of a murderer.

The bodies are about to hit the floor.

The Story

Like Schooled in Magic and Lessons in Etiquette, we open with a conspiracy around our heroine Emily, a visitor from another world, dragged into a land of magic. Only this time, the conspiracy is to recruit a new tutor who will keep Emily safe—Lady Barb from Zangria, who had been a bodyguard to Emily’s friend, Princess Alassa.

Soon, it turns out that Emily will need all the help she can get. She thinks that the magic school of Whitehall will be a reprieve from the responsibilities of her new title. Unfortunately, nothing is going to plan, starting with being roomed with total strangers instead of her friends, and a new law professor who hates her on sight. Martial magic is focused on traps, so each class is like an EOD Hogan’s Alley. Her friends are obsessed with “Ken”—which feels like dodge ball meets Calvin ball—and she’d rather not be bothered.

But before the first week is even finished, bodies start dropping.

Emily needs to come up with a solution to who (or what) the killer is, before the entire school of Whitehall is wiped out.

A Study in Slaughter is a great little murder mystery. Because here, not only is the mystery who / what the killer is, but also, how do you put a stop to the killing? Not to mention, there’s at least one additional mystery that no one even noticed until the solution was sprung upon the reader. Now that takes talent.

But Emily gets to introduce more concepts to the world, such as fingerprints.

I also like how each book reflects on Emily’s win from the previous novel.

The Characters

Emily’s biggest fault is that while she is seldom in error, she is never in doubt. Here, she’s definitely getting a lot to learn, the hard way. In some ways, that might be the biggest flaw she has, and it nearly gets her killed twice in this one—and gets at least one other person definitely killed. Even other characters have noted this flaw. And she’s slowly starting to learn that just because she’s good at this, she has more to learn … and she also has other people after her because of that.

But it’s nice not to have a perfect character who’s always right. Her major contribution to magic is not only her modern technological concepts from our world, but also that she comes at magic from a purely outsider perspective—she can think outside the box because she never had a box.

And it’s so nice to watch Emily think through the magic.

Also, there is the Grandmaster of the school, who seems both wise and cunning … and is doing his best to keep Emily alive, unlike certain other headmasters in fiction I can think of.

And Lady Barb is entertaining, because she’s both trying to take care of Emily, and not smack her upside the head at the same time.

The World

This is a delightful complex world we have here. The magic system, of course, is nice and reasonable. We have plot points that touch on law, charms and healing—and healing here is on par with med school, because to heal requires exact knowledge of what exactly is being fixed, with the additional complications of magic injuries. They even have a medical dummy! They also have medical truth spells, because patients lie.

They even have etiquette lessons on “polite death threats.”

I like how too much magic breaks sanity. Or as the book puts it, “With great power, comes great instability.”

And the continued ripples of Emily’s “improvements” to the world are still being felt. Printing press has led to newspapers …. and the newspapers are filled with as much slander as expected. Whitehall has new textbooks on sale, because they no longer have to be done by hand.

It’s also nice to see a magical school treated as a vocational school, with options for a full six years program, sample classes to feel out what they work best with. And, like some real world colleges, networking is built into the system.

Then there’s the obligatory appearance of sports in a boarding school novel—thank you, Tom Brown’s School Days—and it’s both entertaining, while eating up whole chapters, because Emily is more a scholar than a jock.

The characters even need a law class because, while everyone is from all over the continent, every magic user answers to one central White Council. It even touches on aspects of contract law that reminds me of The Paper Chase (The TV show. No. I’m not that old. I have DVDs.)

But above all, the world building is just smart.

Politics

None.

Content Warning

There’s a body count here. But nothing really dramatic

Who is it for?

“This book is for people who enjoyed reading X, Y and Z authors”

Example: “A book by B author has the gunsmithing of Larry Corriea, the breakneck pace of Robert Ludlum, and the magic use of Jim Butcher”

Why buy it

Three sentences that would make you buy it if it were on the cover of a book you were looking at.