The Accidental Alchemist

Gigi Pandian
Completed 7/1/2025 Reviewed 7/1/2025
3 stars

Taking a little break from my Hugo nominee readings to get in my next book club book.  This is described as a cozy fantasy mystery.  I think it’s cozy because there’s a lot of tea drinking involved.  It’s not quite as cozy as the Legends and Lattes, but it was fun.  I did appreciate that I was able to follow the mystery with the clues, etc, and I actually didn’t know who the killer was until the end.  Perhaps I should have, but the author did a good job of obfuscating the truth.  

The story takes place in Portland, Oregon, which was fun for me, living in the metro area.  I’ve spent a lot of time near where the events took place on Hawthorne Ave.  Zoe Faust moves to the Hawthorne district after spending several years travelling across the US in a trailer.  Before that, she had fled Paris after giving up alchemy, except for herbal concoctions.  Now she’s bought a fixer upper and has had all her storage delivered to the house.  She finds that several of her boxes have been torn open and to her surprise, a living gargoyle pops out.  He explains to her that he needs her help with a very old alchemy book to prevent him from turning back into stone.  Unfortunately, she is very much out of practice and unaware of the symbols in the book.  Then, a local boy breaks into her house, assuming it was still unoccupied and haunted.  He sees the gargoyle and they swear him to secrecy.  The next day, after a walk to a tea shop, she finds a dead handyman on her lawn and her books stolen.  This leads to the mystery of who murdered the man, who stole the books, and a race against time to recover the strange alchemy book to save the gargoyle.

The plot is decent.  The characters are okay.  The book is told from Zoe’s first-person perspective, which was helpful.  She carries around a lot of guilt over the death of her brother and her lover in Paris.  She blames alchemy for their deaths and thus her limiting herself to herbal work.  I bought that she was carrying a lot of guilt, but I thought her processing of it during the course of the mystery felt a little forced.  And she’s not quite a Mary Sue, but close.

Dorian the gargoyle, on the other hand, was a fun character.  He was very French.  He spent a lot of his time cooking, trying to recreate classic French food for Zoe who is a vegan.  That was fun.  The author included some of the recipes at the end of the book.  Dorian was very polite while still being in a panic over turning back to stone.  His banter with Zoe and Braxton, the boy who broke in and saw Dorian talk and move, was light and funny.  Overall, my favorite character.

I was surprised that the other characters didn’t feel as wooden as I thought they would.  I generally liked most of the supporting characters.  They were all very “Portland,” from my experience in this city.  Only Max, the detective on the case was constructed very oddly.  He’s very secretive and clearly embarrassed by his attraction to Zoe.  Yet, the conversations between Max and Zoe were too stilted and very odd.

This was definitely a fluff book, being “cozy” and all.  There was no violence except for the murder and an attempted murder later in the book, but nothing graphic.  There are seven more novels and one novella in this series.  If I was more of a mystery person, I might seek these out when I wanted something light.  I would definitely recommend these to my mystery loving friends looking for a bit of fluff.  I give the book three stars out of five.  Not a masterpiece, but not bad, either.