The Swan Lake Murders: A Mary Wandwalker Mystery

“Find me the dirt on a sorcerer…because he’s the reason I’m not prime minister!”

On the eve of a forecast hurricane, private detective Mary Wandwalker goes to meet thoroughly dislikeable minister Robin Prince to hear his gripe about a career-ruining sorcerer. Yet the minister fails to realize the real target is his teenage daughter, the star of Swan Lake, who is dancing dangerously close to evil magic.

When fifteen year old Irina disappears, Mary, two detectives, and the distraught parents follow the trail to Holywell, a center of witchcraft and healing. But murder follows them — and as the storm closes in, Holywell becomes both prison and sanctuary.

With a desperate killer in their midst, Mary must confront her demons alone as those she loves become the chief suspects.  It takes a séance, another death and a bolt of lightning before the story of Swan Lake can be revised. Because some fairytales are real, especially the legend of young women becoming swans.

The Swan Lake Murders is not so much about a ballet as the archetype behind it: the urge to fly, to be magically free of the bonds of earth and trauma. Evoking the indigenous fairytale behind Swan Lake, the story chronicles a community plus ballet dancer who are marooned by a climate crisis disaster from the air. This novel therefore concludes the elemental quartet begun with water in The Sacred Well Murders (2022), continued with fire in The Alchemy Fire Murder (2023) and earth in Murder on Family Grounds (2024). Contributing air and spirit, The Swan Lake Murders also pays tribute to Shakespeare’s great play about human climate intervention.

More in this story is true than might appear. The witches of today do try to ameliorate the climate emergency much as mentioned here. The debate in magic between a dark side of predatory power versus attempts to better the world by loving co-operation with the nonhuman, these currents are perennial and pertain to more than the world of witchcraft.

The historical Dr John Dee is a big influence on my fictional Billy Dee. He was an important astrologer, mathematician and magus in the court of Elizabeth 1^st. He did practice spiritualism with the aid of dubious medium Edward Kelley. Of course The Swan Lake Murders’ plotting of Kelley’s descendants comes from my imagination.

Swan Lake, the ballet, nevertheless roots the story in the Celtic hinterland of the dreamworld, which connects to ancient cultures everywhere in the motif of people becoming birds and the reverse.

In particular, the relationship of the vulnerable feminine and the majestic swan, of the traumatized and wild nature, is at the heart of this tale. It is entirely fitting that it begins with a doomed attempt to stage Swan Lake in the pre-Christian greenery of Greenwich park, beneath the Royal Observatory. It concludes with a triumphant revision of the ballet that just might be truer to its Celtic origin story.