Page 5 of Without a Clue

Pineapple Trunks notices, for the first time it seems, the crowd of bystanders with their phones all raised our direction.

“Who are you people?” he asks, as if we must be aliens freshly landed.

“Ah. The first intelligent question of the day.” Hugh steps out from the group, a head taller than the rest. He takes off his hat. The sun glints on his silver and gray hair. His blue eyes twinkle. He looks distinguished and mysterious, even here on this sandy port shore, just like his author photo on the back of every one of his mystery books lining the shelves at every bookstore around the globe. “We’re The Seven.”

“The Magnificent Seven,” someone murmurs, phone raised.

“And that girl there,” Hugh says, pointing at me, “belongs with us.”

Chapter 2

I coined that term for the group, actually. Remarketed, more like.

For some awful reason, Hugh and the other six authors had called themselves “the group” for decades (painfully uninformative, I know), and I wasn’t six months in before I changed the group’s official title to something the book world had been calling them all along anyway: The Magnificent Seven.

The Magnificent Seven is exactly what they are: seven celebrated authors each in a different genre who banded together forty years ago to prop one another up as they carry the candle in their distinctive fields.

It’s worked tremendously well, actually.

All things considered, it proved to be an ingenious plan to unite this unlikely group of authors together to cheer one another on. After all, fiction readers tend to read widely. What better marketing technique is there than for one famously good author to constantly recommend the books of the same six famously good others?

Lore is that Hugh and these six other stranger authors were all en route to a writing event and became stranded in an elevator with one random reader. Stuck together for hours, Hugh eventually asked the gentleman, “So. Which of our genres do you read?”

He replied with a hearty laugh, “What do you mean ‘which’? I read you all!”

That day, a plan was hatched.

What if all of these completely distinct authors worked together to promote one another at events? Book signings? Presentations? Endorsements? What if they made an oath to promote one another—and one another only—whenever they were inevitably asked in interviews about their favorite book recommendations? What if, separate in so many ways and yet the same, they grabbed hands and pulled one another up as they all climbed the proverbial ladder? Together?

The Magnificent Seven.

And forty years later, the partnership is something of a fellowship of rings, all but two members (who recently retired and passed the proverbial baton) still the same. Rumors about the group abound, ideas involving secret handshakes, secret codes. The wildest one so far is that there is a secret passageway accessible via Hugh’s library that opens to another room, where an underground ring of publishing elites gather with the sole purpose of skyrocketing The Magnificent Seven’s books to the top of every chart.

For the record, there’s no passageway.

At least, I haven’t found one yet.

And if any outsider would know, it would be me, considering I’ve been working for Hugh and the group for five years.

There are seven genres under the banner of the group. Sure, we almost added the horror writer Aleksandar, but frankly, he was too scary in real life. Even if he did live in a legitimate castle and threw the best parties (part of the thrill was that you never really knew if you would actually make it home).

And here’s the list:

Vibrant Neena, always handing out fruit baskets and throwing propriety in the air for the sake of the bold life. Writes romance. You know. The stuff with people drowning in satin dresses on the covers.

Prim Jackie, the definition of “antithesis to Neena,” who considers being five minutes early as being late and collects—with particular obsession—pushpins from the 1700s. Like, ten-out-of-ten-level hype. Goes on and on about sharing a distant lineage with the king of England and uses that single fact to promote every single one of her historical fiction books. I once saw her holding up a Garfield souvenir T-shirt in quiet fascination. She caught my eye and dropped it like it was gasoline at a fireworks show.

Gordon, who is almost always in some costume or other. To say he lives for the medieval renaissance fair or a good Comic-Con is an understatement. Fantasy.

Crystal, twenty-two-year-old fellow NYC native who made one twelve-second TikTok about her book idea and it blew up to the point of becoming a Paramount movie. She’s always missing important meetings because she’s off water-sliding somewhere.

Ricky, who, I’ll be honest, is totally creepy. Has a mysterious history working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before finding his niche in thriller. Talks extraordinarily slowly and cautiously as though he’s seen things. You never know what they are, and you never really want to find out, but you’re absolutely certain they happened. Things. Rumor is he and Stephen King play chess on their phones together.

Nash, who . . . well . . . he’s Nash. Everybody calls him dashing. Everybody thinks he’s wonderful. Me too, of course. I’d be blind, deaf, and a liar not to admit it. He’s been one of my closest friends in the past three years he’s been on the team, if I really had to pin a title to us. Not that we have a title, of course. Not that we are anything.

Good friends feels like a stretch, honestly. I don’t dare tell others that. He’s far too, well, everything I’m not. I’m perfectly comfortable being the group’s assistant and, by design, his assistant. I’m like his cheerful butler and he the delightful-to-everyone socialite. We laugh behind the scenes; we don’t laugh in them.

And as if his career alone isn’t leagues more extraordinary than my own, Nash grew up on a ranch. He goes off-grid at a snap of his fingers and tells nobody. Spends half his time somewhere out west, preferably under the canopy of a full sky and with absolutely no protection from beasts or rabid people except for his God-given muscles and a larger-than-life knife. Fun fact: He has worn Wrangler jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat in every single photo I have ever seen of him. Every single one—even the blurry paparazzi photos where people catch him at 7 a.m. heading into a coffee shop. I’m not sure, honestly, if he lifts weights, but if he does, I can guarantee it’s while wearing a hat. Writes . . . unsurprisingly, Westerns.