The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious (Magic & Mystery, #5) by Scott Lynch Narrator: Joel Froomkin
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, fantasy mystery
Series: Magic & Mystery #5
Pages: 52
Length: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on July 28, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads
When egos clash during an assemblage of wizards, grandstanding displays of magic become a matter of murder in a witty and suspenseful short story by a New York Times bestselling author.
Curmudgeonly conjurer Shiverick joins a conclave of fellow wizards on the strangest beach in the world expecting the usual flashy outfits, hammy miracles, and predictable suspicions that his own powers are nil. After all, he’s never so much as cast a spell in public. When accusations of fraud end in a flamboyant murder, Shiverick must piece together the truth amid the chaos. An observant and logical thinker, it’s his time to shine.
Scott Lynch’s The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious is part of the Magic & Mystery collection, puzzle-box mysteries from top fantasy authors. They can be read or listened to in one enchanting sitting.
My Review:
Every time I looked at the title of this entry in the Magic & Mystery collection it gave me a bit of a pause. It felt like there was a piece missing, or words in the wrong order, or just something that niggled.
It wasn’t until my second time through (these are short and sometimes that’s just what you need for a reading pick-me-up) that I realized that the title has two meanings. From Shiverick’s own perspective – and it’s his perspective through which we experience the story – he keeps himself suspicious of his wizardly colleagues and the world he has lived in for the past six centuries. (At least six centuries.) It’s because he remains a bit suspicious of everyone and everything that he’s able to solve this murder.
Putting it another way, his innate suspiciousness keeps him from falling into the dangerous and deadly trap of “assume”.
At the same time, Shiverick keeps himself to himself and holds his many, many secrets so close to the chest of his always black robes that his colleagues remain a bit suspicious of him. Up to and including a suspicion that he’s not really a wizard because they’ve never seen him perform any actual magic. (In his world there are other methods of extending one’s life span than wizardly, making his extremely long life evidence of something but not necessarily of something he’s done rather than something he might have taken or stolen.)
From the reader’s perspective as Shiverick solves the murder, it’s likely that his magic is the magic of knowledge – particularly the knowledge of human nature. Possibly, it’s magic of the Sherlockian variety. Or it’s “merely” the magic of common sense, which is not nearly as common as it should be in either Shiverick’s world or our own.
Whatever the state of Shiverick’s magic, or the lack thereof, might be, it’s still a lot of fun to watch him work his own peculiar form of it while successfully fending off yet another attempt on the part of his colleagues to force him to reveal more of his secrets than they have a right to know.
Escape Rating B: I listened to this one first, and then read it second. Fortunately it’s short. Having experienced both, I have to recommend the text over the audio. STRONGLY. If I’d relied on just the audio, this would have been a C instead of a B.
All of the wizards in this tredecennial (once every thirteen years) conclave all have huge, over-the-top personalities. (They’d probably fit right in with the wizards at Unseen University in the Discworld.) They’re loud, they’re big, they’re bright (visually, at least), they’re showy. (They’re probably also FINE in the sense of FINE as an acronym for “fucked-up, insecure, neurotic and egotistical” but that’s another universe.)
In the audiobook, the narrator has given each of them an individual, idiosyncratic, over the top accent. The reading isn’t so much a narration as it is a case of too much of a good thing being very much not wonderful. Listening to the STORY got lost in doing my damndest to understand what each character was saying. Even Shiverick.
The text is written from Shiverick’s wry, world-weary but ever observant perspective, and in that voice the story is clear and easy to follow. We may be as lost as the rest of the wizards in following his logic – because he’s way better at that than they are and there’s considerably more going on than we know at the outset – but the story and his thought processes are clear even if the way he reaches his conclusions is a bit convoluted. Then again, the murder plot was ALSO a bit convoluted, so that tracks.
I picked this one up relatively early in my reading/listening to this series because I loved the author’s Hugo-nominated novelette, “Kaiju Agonistes” and wanted to sample more of his work before diving into his Gentlemen Bastards series that begins with The Lies of Locke Lamora – which has been in my TBR pile for-pretty-much-ever at this point. After LISTENING to The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious I started rethinking that idea, but after READING the story I’m re-thinking my re-thinking towards the positive again. Now I just need to catch the “round tuit” for the whole thing.
But in the meantime, I’ll be back with another novella in the Magic & Mystery collection in the next week or two, because I’m still loving it. Sometimes in audio, sometimes in text, but enjoying these short fantasy mysteries one way or another all the same.
