Author Spotlight

Ruth Knafo Setton

Zigzag Girl is noir with hope—a story of magic, murder, and the secrets people bury under the boardwalk lights. It has everything I love: a glamorous, dangerous Atlantic City, the eerie pull of the Pine Barrens, and a sisterhood of female magicians who design the illusions instead of starring in someone else’s.

The novel began with a haunted theatre on the 13th floor of Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City. The main character, Lucy Moon, appeared to me when I stood on the stage. Two walls of windows overlooked the sea, and I imagined myself performing for an audience of birds and mermaids. The more I learned about the theatre and Atlantic City, the more I knew I had to write this story of magic in what many consider the anti-magic city.

Come to Atlantic City. Walk the boardwalk at night, step into Lucy Moon’s world, and let yourself be fooled. Reviewers have said the book is built like a magic illusion, full of misdirection and surprise, and I hope you’ll enjoy trying to spot the trick before the reveal. If you read it, I’d love to hear what you thought. 

Right now, I am working on a new novel, an archaeological thriller where a different kind of magic rises from the ancient past, lives in memory and stone, and comes alive in the modern world.

About the Author: Ruth Knafo Setton was born in Morocco, a few hours from the Djma el Fna’a, the fabled square of Marrakech, where every night for the past thousand years, the storyteller weaves a web of magic around his audience. Setton must have absorbed the imaginative power of story because when she received her first diary, the first words she wrote were: "I want to be a writer." Years later, she studied magic with some of the world's greatest magicians and wondered if she could recreate the sense of wonder they created with a pen instead of a wand. It was inevitable that the protagonist of her first mystery novel, Zigzag Girl, is a female magician who turns sleuth to solve her friend's murder as well as the mystery of her own origins.