Murder at the Magic Castle — Bruce Kimmel

She's back!

For her seventeenth birthday, crack high school journalist/sleuth Adriana Hofstetter is taken to the Magic Castle, a mansion of magic, where she, her BFF Billy, and her mom, Margaret, delight in the feats of prestidigitation, from amazing card tricks to solid rings that magically connect and disconnect seemingly at will, to birds that appear out of nowhere. It's a world that's baffling and bewildering and which people of all ages flock to be fooled and confounded by mysterious illusions. Adriana thinks it would make a great story for her high school newspaper, but the story takes a different turn when one of the magicians turn up dead. She's convinced all is not what it seems and, being the dogged and hardheaded person she is, she becomes determined to find out everything she can in this world of smoke and mirrors.

Along the way, she has some adventures with her mother and Billy, and she visits Detectives Ramirez and Coyne as well as her elderly friend, producer Patrick Bronstein. And thanks to Billy, Adriana becomes an occasional blogger, letting the blogosphere know of her exploits. But who is it that begins leaving threatening comments and warnings on her blog? Like the other books in the Adriana Hofstetter series, Murder at the Magic Castle is a fun, suspenseful, and sometimes dangerous ride with a young woman who will stop at nothing to get to the truth.