Urban Fantasy Insider’s Guide: The Mad Queens Inc. Series

Surviving your forties requires coffee, good friends, and a morally flexible relationship with illegal magic.

Series Snapshot

Mad Queens Inc. is my new midlife urban fantasy trilogy, set in a Vancouver where magic comes with licenses and cops. My heroine has none of the first and far too much attention from the second.

Tovah Silver and her three best friends run an unlicensed magic fixer agency. All four of them got their magic in midlife, and to the outside world it looks exactly like perimenopause. Hot flashes, brain fog, mood swings, sensory overload. Every symptom a doctor waves off and the world at large  assuming the Mad Queens top out at party tricks.

The world at large is wrong. (Correcting them would be a felony.)

Each Queen is hiding a second magic, except having more than one kind is very, very illegal. So they smile, look harmless, and bill the client.

If you love Shannon Mayer’s Forty Proof and Robyn Peterman’s Good to the Last Death, pull up a chair. This is paranormal women’s fiction with slow-burn romance, a lot of banter, and a found family who’d help you hide a body.

Main Characters

Tovah Silver is forty-something, a widow, and the owner of Mad Queens Inc., which she inherited from her Aunt Este along with the hundred-year-old brick building it lives in. She got her magic at forty, in the same brutal stretch that took her husband and her aunt, and she’s been handling her grief the way she’d handle a difficult client: efficiently, at a distance, with jokes.

Her magic is hot flash fire. Yes, really. Flames down her arms, very impressive, burns out fast. (The other magic we don’t talk about.) She boxes, she drops Yiddish endearments and pop culture references in equal measure, and she owns an emotional-support spider plant named Kvetch.

The other three Queens share her crown tattoo and her secrets.

Jinny is a stage actress who can walk into any room as somebody else and make you believe it. She’s five-foot-two, a single mom, and runs on the power of delusion. Her magic presents as like brain fog.

Nisha is the team mom. She reads a room before she’s finished taking off her coat, and her magic looks like mood swings. Her hugs are not just hugs.

Margot is British, calls everyone petal, loves a spreadsheet, and can find anything on the internet that somebody very much wanted buried. Her magic is rooted in sensory overload. Phones drop calls. Lights flicker. Wards stutter.

Then there’s Nikolai Azarov. Vancouver’s only golem maker, Tovah’s brother’s best friend, and a man who’s insufferable even without leverage. Unfortunately, he gets leverage. He’s closed-lipped, dry, plays chess, and treats the golems and gargoyles he makes like family. They get paid. They get days off. Tovah calls him Nicky. He hates it. I adore him, along with every banter-filled scene between the two of them that I get to write.

Rounding things out: Oz, Tovah’s chess-obsessed little brother, who has a distillery and no magic. Rin, Tovah’s cousin, a wolf shifter who runs the magic cops and thinks the agency is a public safety risk. Varda, Nikolai’s estranged mother, who runs the magical entertainment district and binds people  with red thread. Aunt Este called her the Champagne Scorpion.

Plus Nikolai’s creations: Declan, a golem with an Irish lilt and better clothes than you. Cookie, a golem chef who thinks you’re too thin. Beni, a gargoyle who is far too gentle for security work. Oh, and a sketchy magic mirror with opinions.

What Each Book Delivers

Every book has a case that wraps up by the end, plus all the stuff that doesn’t: four women keeping a very illegal secret, a cousin with a badge, and Nikolai.

Golem for Broke, Book 1, starts with Tovah at a mammogram. Then an assassin golem shows up. (As if the mammogram wasn’t enough.) To survive, she uses the magic she’s not supposed to have, and she thinks she got away with it. Then Nikolai figures out what she actually did to that golem and, instead of turning her in, names his price. So now she’s got a dangerous bargain to honor, magic cops circling her agency, and a hand-delivered clay effigy on her bed that somebody is going to answer for.

Shift Show, Book 2: dragons don’t exist. Someone should tell the one currently committing murder. Tovah walks into a black-tie New Year’s gala on the easiest job of her career and walks out an eyewitness. Then a client hires the Queens to prove somebody stole his magic and used it to kill. She’s about sixty percent sure he’s lying. Not a deal-breaker. It’s up for pre-order now.

And yes, there’s a Book 3 coming.

Tropes, Creatures, and Worldbuilding

If you like your tropes labeled: midlife heroines, forbidden magic, women everybody underestimates, a case-of-the-book mystery, and a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance with her brother’s best friend, you've come to the right place.

Creature-wise, there are golems and gargoyles everywhere. (Forget what you’ve heard about rubbing a letter off a golem’s forehead. Doesn’t work here.) There are shifters. And there’s a ziz, the giant bird of Jewish legend, who in my version is seven feet tall, wears a bejeweled turban, and refers to herself in the third person. 

Her name is Empress and she guards the Empress Hotel, which is the only way into the Remix: pockets of magic laid over Vancouver like bonus tracks. Before she lets you in, she confiscates whatever she’s decided makes you dangerous. It varies by visit. 

Spice Level and Romance Journey

Slow burn. Sloooow.

Tovah and Nikolai are sort of enemies-to-lovers with history, since he’s been underfoot as her brother’s best friend for years. Their relationship kicks off with him holding the one secret that could ruin her, which is not exactly a meet-cute.

So if you want them in bed by chapter three, these are not your people. What you get instead is banter, tension, and two guarded adults who are very good at pretending they don’t care.

Where to Go After Mad Queens Inc.

If you’ve finished Golem for Broke and need something to read while you wait for Shift Show, you’ve got options.

My Magic After Midlife series gives you another forty-something heroine with zero effs left to give, plus a grumpy wolf shifter, a golem named Emmett, and a gargoyle named Pyotr. If the midlife magic and the found family are what you came for, start there. It's complete at 7 books.

The Jezebel Files takes you to a different version of Vancouver, where magic is public and regulated, and a PI with illegal magic is stuck in a true enemies-to-lovers arc with the man in charge. If you’re here for hidden powers and a heroine who bends rules until they squeal, that’s your next stop. 6 books, no waiting to binge them.

Middle age isn’t a crisis. It’s a weapon. Start the Mad Queens Inc. series here: https://www.deborahwildebooks.com/collections/mad-queens-inc