Friendship is the Love Story

Tovah Silver has three best friends and they all have the same crown tattooed on the inside of their wrists. These are the Mad Queens, running a magic fixer agency together.

Jinny is a stage actress who can walk into any room as somebody else and make you believe it. Nisha reads a room before she's finished taking off her coat. Margot calls everyone petal and can find anything on the internet that somebody very much wanted buried.

Their magic reads, to the outside world, as perimenopause. Hot flashes, brain fog, mood swings—every symptom a doctor waves off. Four women told for years that what's happening to them is nothing, now aiming it at people.

There's a man in this book too, and he causes Tovah a tremendous amount of trouble. I adore Nikolai along with every banter-filled scene between the two of them that I get to write.

Nikolai is still assembling his opinion of her. He's working from a partial file, and every sharp thing she says is new information he has to sort.

A romance comes with its own engine. Nobody leans in wondering when the best friend will show up, so the friendship has to earn its place another way.

Her friends have the complete file and stayed anyway.

Tovah is a widow who manifested magic at forty, in the same brutal stretch that took her aunt and her husband, and who has been handling her own grief the way you'd handle a difficult client: efficiently, at a distance, with jokes. She's very good at it. The Queens are the only people on earth who don't buy it.

Which makes them the only ones who can say you're doing the thing again and be right. Tovah can outrun almost anything. She cannot outrun three women who already know how this goes and will order takeout to get her through the evening.

Bluntness is a love language when the aim is good.

Women who can be genuinely honest with each other and land zero damage? You only get that accurate about somebody after years of paying attention, and you only get to be that accurate out loud if you've all already agreed nobody's leaving.

The romance is a negotiation. The friendship is ratified.

So when everything goes sideways—and it does, repeatedly, at my hand—Nikolai may be who Tovah is afraid of losing. The Queens are who she'll call from the wreckage. Found family isn't a bonus feature I bolt on for warmth. It's the load-bearing wall.

The declaration in the rain goes to a love interest.

The two a.m. text that says come outside and offers no further information goes to the women with the matching tattoos.

And they come outside.

Their next job involves assassination by golem. Also a sketchy magic mirror with opinions.

Golem for Broke releases early on September 28 on Deborah Wilde Books. Pre-order it now to meet Tovah Silver and the Mad Queens.