THE SECRET OF MAGIC Opening the mail for her mentor and employer, Thurgood Marshall, at the NAACP office in New York, Regina Robichard is captivated by a letter from famous southern author M. P. Calhoun, asking for an investigation of the murder of a young black man, Joe Howard Wilson. Robichard is a fan of Calhoun, having read her book about a magical forest and an unsolved murder. As a stand-in for Marshall, Robichard travels to Revere, Mississippi, to find out the truth behind the murder of Wilson, who was among scores of black men returning from the war, unwilling to put up with the humiliations of racism. What she discovers are parallels between life in Revere and Calhoun’s book. How much of the book is real, and how does it connect to the murder? Inspired by her grandfather, who fought in WWII and was a huge admirer of Thurgood Marshall, and her own admiration of Marshall colleague Constance Baker Motley, Johnson (The Air between Us, 2008) offers a completely engaging southern gothic with unforgettable characters in this fictionalized account of a pivotal NAACP case from the 1940s. --Vanessa Bush Deborah Johnson is the author of The Air Between Us , which received the Mississippi Library Association Award for fiction. She now lives in Columbus, Mississippi, and is working on her next novel.  Regina Mary Robichard noticed the envelope as soon as she entered her office. Fat and cream-colored, it lay there among the business letters, newspapers, and circulars on her small desk. It looked out of place, like an invitation. Not just any invitation, either, but an opening to something she might actually like to attend. Later, it was the photograph within that envelope that would capture her attention, and keep it. But for now the envelope itself was enough. She had come in on a Saturday with the idea of working for a few hours and then, since she was downtown, rewarding herself with a little shopping at Best & Co. or at Peck & Peck. There was a sale on hats at Gimbels, but she had a lot of hats and didn’t really need more. She’d read about another good deal, this one for better suits, at May D& F and a new movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, which was playing at the Rialto in Times Square. She thought about taking that in as well. If she was lucky, all of this might keep her out of her new stepfather’s house, and her mother—or, rather, her parents—would be asleep when she came in. It was a legend in the family how Regina, when she was little, under six, would go up to a man—any man—who had come to hear one of her famous mother’s famous speeches and say, “Would you like to marry my mommy? Would you like to be my daddy?” Often the men she asked did not know how to take this. They’d duck. They’d turn away. Of course they all knew what had happened to Oscar Robichard, not that long ago in Omaha, Nebraska. They wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t, and they were all sympathetic. But nobody wanted to be Regina’s daddy. Nobody had wanted to marry her mother. Until now. “Monday,” Regina said aloud, “I’ve got to start looking for my own place.” I’ve got a job now, and my own life. It’s time. Behind her, she left the main door unlocked and opened a crack in case someone else came in, always a possibility on a Saturday here at the LDF, or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as it was more formally known. People worked late; they came in on weekends. There was always that much to do. Regina shared her space with three other lawyers, all of them men, one of them white. None of whom exactly relished having a woman in their midst. They never said this, not outright, but it was implied in their stories that stopped in mid-?sentence, in laughter that abruptly died when she came into the room. She suspected that half the male lawyers thought she was here because her mother was Ida Jane Robichard, the other half because of the way that her father had died. They were all wrong. Regina knew she was here because she was born to be here, born to value the law and its order. With her history, who wouldn’t? But this didn’t stop her from sometimes feeling . . . well, strange. Especially because she sat directly across from Edgar Morrison Moseley III (“But my friends call me Skip”), hired as a staff lawyer three weeks before she’d been, fully as ambitious as she was herself, and the nemesis of what she liked to call her “legal life.” Skip had never been happy to have a woman in the office, a fact he made abundantly clear. Invariably, the women lawyers he talked about had something in common with Regina—“Hey, she looked exactly like you look. Graduated Columbia, too. I was astounded”—and they all ended up in either a sad or bad way. “War’s over. Women need to do their duty, go back home and make babies. A woman working takes a job away from a family man.” This was his continual refrain, called out whenever he thought Regina might be listening. Once he’d actually lectured her to her face while they were having sandwiches and coffee at th