Coming Soon — The Beckett Cain series is actively in progress. Check back for release news, or visit the World of Beckett Cain to explore the series world now.
Series Introduction
Beckett Cain is 36 years old and has been licensed by the Dominion Convocation as a magical private investigator for nearly a decade. He drives a vintage ice cream truck called the Pink Monstrosity. It doubles as his mage kit and is filled with junk his magic likes: broken watches, cracked mirrors, discarded cigarette lighters. He uses this junk as magical anchors in place of the approved anchors that every other mage in the DC-Maryland-Virginia region is expected to use. Beckett has no mage family to back him. And the Mage Academy sealed his magic test ten years ago for reasons nobody will explain to him.
What makes the Beckett Cain series distinct is crossing improvised magic with magical bureaucracy. The Three-Anchor Framework—every spell requires a Shape, a Weight, and a Power source—is standardized by the Dominion Convocation. Beckett’s magic doesn’t fit. He finds his anchors in discarded objects and ambient sounds (including, his Basset Hound’s bark), making his magic both versatile and unmeasurable by Convocation standards. This puts him in permanent tension with the Convocation even as they hire him to solve a case they can’t assign to their own people. The DMV (DC-Maryland-Virginia) is a magical ecosystem with its own political landmarks, from the state-border confluence at Founders Park in Alexandria to the tourist mage economy in Shirlington Village.
The tone is wry noir. The stakes are real. Illegal transmutation, political cover-ups. Maybe a case that could topple the Warden of the Potomac. But Beckett approaches all of it with dry humor and a Basset Hound named Winslow who just wants to nap. Beckett carries a decade of unresolved anger about a sealed test and his own family’s bizarre behavior when his magic first appeared when he was a child.
Book 1: Unaligned Magic
Status: In Progress
Logline: When the Dominion Convocation hires Beckett Cain to solve a ten-year-old cold case, he quickly discovers that someone buried this crime because knowing who did it could bring down the Warden of the Potomac.
Genre and Tone Tags
- Urban Fantasy
- Supernatural Investigation
- Noir
- DMV Setting (DC/Maryland/Virginia)
- Magical Politics
- Wry Humor
- Found Family
- Procedural Mystery
- Magical Bureaucracy
- Mage Detective
- Unorthodox Magic
Who Will Love This Series
- If you love the Dresden Files for the mage-as-private-detective premise but want a DMV setting with deep local texture instead of Chicago, Beckett Cain is your next series.
- If you love procedural mysteries where the investigator has a particular method that is endearingly idiosyncratic (think Monk, but with improvised spells instead of hand sanitizer), Beckett’s junk-anchor approach will scratch that itch.
- If you love urban fantasy grounded in real place, where you could drive to the locations and eat at the lunch spots, this series was built for you.
- If you want wry humor that doesn’t undercut the stakes….comedy that makes the magic feel more real. the Beckett Cain series delivers both.
Linda Maye Adams — Urban Fantasy, Space Opera & Superhero Fiction 
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