Xristian Cornack is not a detective. He is a consultant. A gentleman of independent means. A man with a particular interest in things that are supposed to hold together and aren't quite managing it. He will tell you this pleasantly, with complete composure, and every word of it will be true — and the entire statement will be a masterclass in the art of not quite answering the question.

The question is always some version of the same thing: How do you keep ending up in the middle of these situations?

He has been thinking about it for the better part of two centuries.

When a dead man in a Viennese auction house turns out to be not quite as dead as advertised, Xristian finds himself pulled from a routine assessment for the Foxander Casino into something considerably older and stranger — a casino chip out of circulation for forty years, a document hidden inside a painting's frame, a provenance dispute filed through a dimensional arbitration channel that has no jurisdiction over the physical world, and a third interested party who disappears through a cellar portal before anyone can ask the right questions.

The case moves from Vienna to Edinburgh to the south of France. It moves the way all his cases move — with the confident inevitability of something that has identified its ideal recipient and is waiting for him to catch up.

What Xristian will not tell you is that every case, in some register he can feel but rarely articulates, is adjacent to the search. Not the investigation. The other one. The one that has been running longer than any single lifetime.

He carries a great deal with him. He is very good at timing.

Peculiar Engagements is the first title in a mystery series set at the intersection of the Foxander Casino's interdimensional operations, the FrankiVerse Cafe's patient and detailed record-keeping, and the accumulated weight of a very long life looking for something it has always known how to find.

Written in the FrankiVerse Cafe tradition. Cardamom not included.