novelette · Mystery
The Blindfold Act
The carnival's mind-reader is a fraud who sees through everyone — until the show's owner turns up dead in his locked wagon, and the one truth she can't help reading points straight at the girl she loves.
4 of 6 chapters written
Content note: A carnival murder mystery — a death, grief, and a hard moral choice, all restrained and off-page. No gore, nothing graphic. Dark but not bleak.
A mystery of the Sawdust Circuit. Madame Sonora reads strangers for a dime — the tan line, the held hat, the lie behind the smile — and has spent fifteen years being unreadable herself. Then Colonel Aurelio is found dead in his locked pay-wagon with the week’s take gone, the law wants it pinned on the show, and the show wants it buried by Friday. Sonora starts reading her own family to keep them safe — and reads, in the one face she never wanted to, exactly what happened.
First person, past tense; wry, confessional, voice-forward. Six chapters. The whole case, the turn, and the ending are laid out in the blueprint — a standalone, marked complete with no sequel.
Chapters
- 1 The Pay-Wagon
- 2 A Cold Reading
- 3 The Tells
- 4 The Understudy
- …2 more chapters planned