"Magic Mirror" by Georgia Lee Maxwell

Georgia Lee Maxwell is a society reporter for a small newspaper in the Florida Panhandle. Blamed some mixed-up type (which suggested a criminal attended a society “do” as an honored guest), she quits her job and makes a rather abrupt change. She moves to Paris.

 

She’s scraped together freelancing jobs, and then a friend asks her to substitute for an interview with an art restorer. They arrived at the small, family-endowed museum, and are barely in the door when masked gunman break in, force Georgia Lee, the art restorer, and the museum director to lie on the floor, and kill the security guard. They steal one of the museum’s less-valuable objects – a piece of black obsidian known and the mirror of Nostradamus. 

 

Georgia Lee is determined to pursue the story; after all, she was something of an eyewitness to the crime. She attends press briefings, she interviews witnesses, and she follows people she thinks might be suspects. And she soon finds herself involved in an offer to pay for the mirror, second murder, a second murder, being considered both a suspect and an assistant to the police, and a kidnapping – her own.

 

Michaela Thompson

Magic Mirror by Michaela Thompson was originally published in 1988, when the author used the pen name of Mickey Friedman, and republished in 2013. It’s now available in eBook format.  It’s the first of two Georgia Lee Maxwell mysteries, the second being A Temporary Ghost.

 

In addition to the Georgia Lee Maxwell mysteries, Thompson also wrote five other mystery novels. She grew up on the northwest Florida Gulf Coast. She worked as a newspaper reporter and freelance journalist, and she’s contributed short stories to a number of anthologies. She lives in New York City. 

If you like reding about Paris, and an American moving to Paris, this is a mystery story to enjoy. It’s occasionally tongue-in-cheek, and the story of the mirror gets a bit complicated, but it’s an enjoyable story. And having been first published in 1988, there are no mobiles phones, internet, or social media.