Rosemary Edghill cast a keenly observant, friendly, yet faintly amused eye on an intriguing American micro-culture. The Bast novels offer a very new view of the practitioners of a very old faith. Edghill allows that there's still magic in the air. Rosemary Edghill's Bast novels are a real treat. Bell, Book, and Murder contains all three Bast novels, Speak Daggers to Her, Book of Moons , and the first softcover edition of The Bowl of Night (excerpted in USA Today ). “Edghill has a chatty, witty style that keeps the action fast-paced. Definitely a new twist to the mystery genre.” ― USA Today Rosemary Edghill is a prolific writer in several genres, under her own name and various pseudonyms. Her Bast books, witty mysteries featuring a Wiccan amateur detective, were collected in Bell, Book, and Murder . She has also written Regency Romances and fantasy novels, including several collaborations with Mercedes Lackey ( Spirits White as Lightning and Mad Maudlin ) and Andre Norton ( Shadow of Albion and Leopard in Exile ). Edghill lives in upstate New York with several cats and several Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, which she shows in obedience competitions. Bell, Book, and Murder The Bast Mysteries By Edghill, Rosemary Forge Books Copyright © 1998 Edghill, Rosemary All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312867683 I     FRIDAY, JUNE 15, 5:20 P.M.   I could say this was any large Eastern city, but you’d know it was New York. I could say my name was Isobel Gowdie, or Janet Kyteler, or even Tam Lin, but what’s on my paychecks and phone bills isn’t important. My name—my real name—is Bast. I live in New York and I’m a Witch. Put away your pitchforks—or more likely, here in the nineties, stifle your yawns and stop edging toward the door. It’s just my religion, into which I put about as much time and money as you do into whatever you do that isn’t for the biweekly paycheck. I’m not inclined to criticize any way a person might have found to waste excess money, and I’m not having as much fun as you probably imagine I’m having. No naked orgies under the moon, for example; the Parks Commission would object and it’s no way to have safe sex. When modern Witches meet, the main concern is usually how to fit eight people and the couch into a room the size of a Manhattan living room and make sure you leave with your own Reeboks. No lubricious fantasy there. Just one more thing about the W word and then I’ll leave it, since it’s a subject that either bores you silly or you’ve got all the wrong ideas and won’t change them for anything I say. Personally, I’d rather we called ourselves anything else, from Pagans to Earth Religionists to Aquarians. It would fit most of us better: over-educated ex-hippies trying to unscrew the inscrutable, trying to make sense of life through ritual and gnosis. But we got stuck with the W word back in the forties, when a lovely half-mad Brit picked up Dr. Margaret Murray’s anthropological dream-mongering about the witch trials in western Europe and tried to weave a modern religion out of it, patching and piecing from everything that caught his fancy. By the time Gerald B. Gardner was done, his “ wicca-craften ” had damn little resemblance to the Witches out of history and fairy tales, and so do we. Now we’re stuck with the name and a tag-end of faded glory that some of us spend a lot of time justifying to anyone who shows the least interest. I don’t. What I was trying to justify, this particular Friday, was a left-hand margin the typesetter had accidentally set ragged and the client didn’t want to pay to get reset. Since the typesetter didn’t want to eat the cost and reset it for free, that left me, a Number 10 single-sided razor blade, and a lot of freelance hours. The Bookie Joint—Houston Graphics if I answer the phone before 5:00—is one of those places you’ve never heard of unless you’re in the business—a freelance studio that does layout and pasteup, turning piles of typeset galleys into pages of type. They call the people who do it artists, which is the only glamorous thing about the job. Layout artist is a dead-end job in a dying field; most books these days are set page-for-page, and desktop publishing is taking over for the really small presses. But if you don’t mind earning less than ten dollars an hour with no bennies and no guarantees, it’s a great job. Everybody who works here is something else—actors, writers, artists. Your schedule is flexible to fit around your other jobs. You can get as many or as few hours a week as you need—except when something like the job in front of me comes up. I’d promised Raymond I’d finish it before I left tonight. He’s our art director and takes it almost as seriously as he does modern dance. Ray’s a dancer—at least he was while he still had his knees. We have some framed stills on the walls. Jazz Ballet of Harlem. Pretty. Ragged left instead of ragged right. You’d think Stereotype never typeset a sheaf of poems before. The