The Tarot Reader

Turner (The Engagement Party) ups her game in this intelligent thriller centered on North Carolina con artist Jade Crawford. Raised by grifter parents, 25-year-old Jade supports herself by supplying gullible customers with phony tarot readings and séances at the Ravencroft Psychic Parlor and Shoppe in Winston-Salem, N.C. With money drying up, Jade decides to take a shot at claiming a $2,000 reward for information about missing North Carolina politician Thomas Nichols. She calls a police tip line and fabricates a story about spotting Nichols at a waste management facility near where he was last seen. Two detectives then interview her for more information, and she claims the tip came to her in a psychic vision. When cops actually find Nichols’s corpse at the facility, a stunned Jade becomes both a lead suspect and a target for the real killer, who learns that her tip led authorities to the body. Turner makes Jade a winning, three-dimensional antihero, and sticks the landing with a resolution that ties up loose ends while skirting predictability. Fans of Richard Lange will be hooked. Agent: Katie Shea Boutillier, Donald Maass Literary. (Oct.)