The Starseekers by Nicole Glover [Book Review]

Rocket science is hard enough without adding magic, murder, and pirate treasure to the equation. The Starseekers is wildly imaginative, occasionally overstuffed, and still a pretty fun ride.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

If NASA had added spellwork, cursed museum artifacts, and a children’s magic show to the Space Race, I might have paid significantly more attention in science class.

Nicole Glover’s The Starseekers, the fourth book in the Murder and Magic series, has one of those premises that immediately made me wonder why nobody had handed me this exact combination before.

It’s the 1960s. America is racing toward the moon. Cynthia Rhodes is a brilliant Black arcane engineer working at NASA’s Ainsworth Research Labs, where apparently rocket science can become even more complicated if you add magic to the equations.

Because Cynthia is clearly not busy enough, she also hosts an educational television show about magic, helps raise her younger sisters, and has inherited a family tendency toward amateur sleuthing.

Honestly, some of us can barely answer emails before lunch.

Welcome to NASA, Now With Magic

The strongest thing about The Starseekers is easily its world.

Glover takes the familiar history of the Space Race and quietly shifts it sideways, creating a version of the 1960s where science and magic coexist. Cynthia isn’t just calculating trajectories. She’s working with magical systems, enchanted equipment, specialized inks, and constellation-based spellwork as part of everyday life.

That everyday quality is important. Nobody is standing around gasping because magic exists. It’s simply another tool people use, study, teach, argue over, and occasionally misuse in spectacularly dangerous ways.

And putting a Black woman at the center of this version of NASA gives the whole thing a wonderfully Hidden Figures vibe, but make it magical, energy.

Cynthia is smart, capable, ambitious, and very good at what she does. She’s also hosting a public television program with Theodore Danner, a professor of arcane archaeology who happens to be extremely attractive, which certainly doesn’t hurt the job.

If you’ve ever wanted a little Lessons in Chemistry energy with more constellations, this is pretty close.

There Is A Lot Going On Here

The actual mystery kicks off when a cursed museum curator nearly disrupts Cynthia and Theo’s broadcast. That leads them toward a strange museum theft, which would probably be enough trouble for one book.

It is not enough trouble for this book.

Soon Cynthia witnesses the death of one of her coworkers in what appears to be a catastrophic lab accident. She becomes convinced it was murder, and the investigation starts tangling itself together with the museum case.

Then we get magical sabotage, pirate treasure, mysterious plants, Cynthia’s amnesiac grandparents, danger to the space program, and even a television syndication storyline.

I may have forgotten something. There was a lot happening.

That’s where The Starseekers became a little less satisfying for me.

Nearly every scene seems to be pushing two or three different plotlines forward, which keeps the story moving but also makes the central mystery feel crowded. The magic system is flexible enough that clues don’t always feel like pieces the reader could reasonably assemble on their own.

So if you’re coming for a tightly constructed, fair-play whodunnit where you can slap your hand on the table fifty pages before the reveal and yell, “I KNEW IT,” this probably isn’t that book.

It works much better as a magical-realism historical-fiction adventure that happens to contain several mysteries.

The Rhodes Family Deserves Its Own Show

What kept me happily reading was Cynthia’s world outside the investigation.

The Rhodes family is genuinely delightful. Cynthia’s sisters, her cooking-show-host best friend, her treasure-hunting grandparents, and the people orbiting her life all get moments to be charming, funny, helpful, or unexpectedly important.

In fact, I sometimes enjoyed the community problem-solving more than the official Cynthia-and-Theo detective partnership.

There’s something really warm about watching Cynthia move from NASA sabotage to family responsibilities to flirting with Theo without the book treating any one part of her life as less meaningful than another.

Those smaller moments are what really clicked for me.

History tends to get flattened into major events when we look backward. Presidents. Protests. Wars. Space launches. Big dates printed in bold type.

But people were also making dinner.

They were falling in love.

They were teasing their siblings, watching television, and trying to keep their jobs while the world changed around them.

Glover understands that, and The Starseekers is at its best whenever it slows down long enough to let Cynthia simply live inside this extraordinary version of ordinary life.

Progress Is Complicated

The book also follows an interesting thread about racism and what happens when discrimination becomes less obvious without actually disappearing.

Cynthia and other Black characters are respected for their intelligence and expertise, but that doesn’t mean every barrier has vanished. Hierarchies, invisible ceilings, assumptions, and forms of exclusion still lurk beneath all that supposed progress.

I wanted more of this.

The book raises some genuinely interesting questions about what equality looks like in a world that has changed in certain ways while stubbornly refusing to change in others. But with murders, museum thefts, magical artifacts, pirate treasure, NASA sabotage, television careers, and everything else demanding attention, those ideas sometimes get pushed to the side.

For me, they were actually more compelling than parts of the mystery.

My Final Take

The Starseekers is busy. Possibly too busy.

But it’s also imaginative, warm, clever, and filled with characters I enjoyed spending time with.

I loved Glover’s magical version of the Space Race. I loved seeing Black excellence placed right at the center of that world. And I especially loved the quieter idea underneath all the murder and magic: even during huge moments in history, people still build families, chase careers, fall for their coworkers, make dinner, and find reasons to enjoy their lives.

I just wish the book had given some of its strongest ideas a little more room to breathe.

Still, I’d absolutely recommend it, especially if your preferred mystery comes with rocket science, spellwork, family chaos, and the occasional cursed museum employee.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.