Susan Oleksiw

First in a new series, Murder at the Wham Bam Club by Carolyn Marie Wilkins takes us to a small town in 1922 Illinois. Nola left little town of Agate behind when she fled the Phyllis Wheatley Institute for Colored Girls to elope with her beloved. When he died in World War I, her aunt Sarah invited her to return and live with her. The relationship is a good one: Aunt Sarah understands her niece with her psychic powers because her own are even stronger, and supplemented by powerful herbal remedies. Nola will need all of this and more when she takes on the task of finding one of the Institute girls who has disappeared.
 
Nola is not easy to intimidate so when she sees a woman being shoved by a man who then walks off she rushes to her, taking the woman home to her aunt's house. The woman is Mrs. Wyatt, head of the Institute, who was arguing with a man she thinks has information about the missing student; she enlists Nola's help. Employed by a caterer, Nola has both free time and a window on the world of the town's white power structure including some of the finest—and richest—families. At the moment Agate is gearing up for an election to the US Congress. The incumbent, Harry Skelton, calls himself "a true friend of the colored man," and many support him, including Boss Dillard, the town's only Negro lawyer and head of a large network of illegal whiskey production and distribution. Into this world comes Skelton's campaign team and a few young girls who know how to sneak out of the Institute at night and get to the famed Wham Bam Club for that delicious jazz. These are just a few of the richly drawn characters who bedevil, entrance, threaten, confound, and aid Nola and her aunt.
 
The crime is an intricate one, and the telling marks the boundaries between the groups at this time, the parameters of social and political life that control everyone, including the socially prominent Mrs. Ratcliffe, who wants to do more than she knows how or understands, and Nola, who has to cope with the daily slights that were the fate (and sometimes still are) of the colored person, watching a trolley pass her by or facing a police officer at the door. Nola and her aunt Sarah cope with the help of their Spirits, who offer wisdom and guidance. These elusive figures are a strong element in the plot and all but step onto the stage and sit down in the plush chairs for a chat about Nola's problem, finding Lilly. And she does find her, using both her ability to read auras and her practical skill of ferreting out physical clues. There are both winners and losers in this tale that upends several lives. But the biggest winner is Nola, who shows herself to be someone to watch, and someone we look forward to following in another story.
 
This book is subtitled A Psychics and Soul Food Mystery, and indeed it has both. The soul food recipes come in general descriptions of how to prepare a specific dish, so if you're going to try any of them, you'll have to work out the ingredients and proportions yourself. My favorite, which I hope to try, is the cornbread described on page 222.