The Madness of Mercury
You’ve heard of the Age of Aquarius, right? Well this cozy mystery is about something more sinister: The Madness of Mercury (Midnight Ink).
In this first book of the Zodiac Mystery series by Connie di Marco, featuring San Francisco astrologer Julia Bonatti, our protagonist finds herself in danger as her life goes into freefall when Mercury goes into retrograde. With its occult references and plot premise, The Madness of Mercury is an intriguing read. The setting is so descriptive that the reader learns which San Fran neighborhoods have the best views and worst parking.
Julia is being threatened when the city’s latest religious cult leader (inspired by the notorious Jim Jones) orders angry mobs to protest outside her apartment. She finds shelter in a Victorian mansion with a client who has problems of her own. Her client is caring for two elderly aunts, one of whom is showing signs of dementia. The other aunt is a fan of the cult leader who is persecuting Julia. On top of that, a young man suddenly shows up at the house and claims to be a long-lost relative.
The Madness of Mercury takes the reader into weird scenes at the mansion, including bizarre events in the garden and a séance during a rainstorm. Here’s some atmosphere for you: When one of the aunties clutches Julia’s arm, she sees that “a network of veins on her hand bulged like blue worms burrowing under the parchment of her flesh.”
As an astrologer and advice columnist, Julia goes way beyond horoscopes. She charts career, medical and relationship advice by using a software that can calculate decades of moon and planet “transits” in a nanosecond. (And did you know that Uranus rules electricity?) But with the crisis Julia is embroiled in, she must marshal all her astrology know-how to investigate the vicious cult leader.
“I’d like to find out his birth date and if possible, the time,” she said. “Maybe I can find a chink in his armor.”
Author di Marco got into astrology her second year of college when her Mom had a stroke and died suddenly.
“My Dad was deeply depressed, I was really worried,” she says. Around that time, a friend dragged her to a party where she met an amateur astrologer who needed practice.
“She predicted everything would clear up and I’d have a fresh perspective by May. She was right.”
“After that, I had to learn more. I bought a lot of psychic books,” di Marco says. “They weren’t as common back then.”
Di Marco and other astrologers reason that humanity has lived by the timing of the sun and moon since the beginning. Astrology expands upon that concept by interpreting life patterns from how people live within the timing and configurations of the planets.
“For me, astrology is the art of synthesis, seeing how a person presents herself to the world and how they are inside,” di Marco says.
Di Marco is from Boston, where she made the Dean’s List in English Literature. As a medical secretary, she typed autopsy reports for two years.
She lived in San Francisco from 1971 through 1981, when memories of the never-identified Zodiac Killer who terrified north California were still fresh.
“I bit the bullet to move to the Seventh Circle of Hell, known as LA,” di Marco said, because of her yearning to act. At some point, di Marco was hustling auditions by day and writing mysteries by night.
Di Marco played weird cousin Frida in Meet the Fockers but her scene was cut. “It’s on DVD and I get royalties,” she acknowledges. She also appeared in ER and she did two episodes of LA. Law.
She still lives in LA and misses San Francisco. “I visit my favorite haunts twice a year.” The author bases her amateur sleuth books in San Francisco because “It’s a city with lots of faces and moods.”
There are three published books in the Zodiac Mystery series and di Marco has finished a prequel novella along with books four and five, in which Julia discovers what really happened when her fiancé was killed in a hit-and-run. Di Marco is now on the sixth in the series.
As for the biggest unknown, is there such a thing as fate?
She writes in the novel, “Astrologers grappled with those larger issues too. How much is carved in stone? What does the birth chart describe and how much can the individual evolve?”
“We don’t have any easy answers either.”
