Book Details:
Author: Deborah Wilde
Release Date: October 12, 2026
Series: Book 1 of 2: Mad Queens Inc.
Genre: Urban Fantasy, Women’s Fantasy, Humorous
Format: E-book
Pages: 326 pages
Publisher: Te Da Media Inc.
Blurb:
Surviving your forties requires coffee, good friends, and a morally flexible relationship with illegal magic.
Tovah Silver runs Mad Queens Inc., an unlicensed magical problem-solving agency with her three best friends. They’ve built their reputation on grit, loopholes, and unrepentant competence, ignoring those who think their perimenopausal magic tops out at party tricks.
Read full book blurb
They’re wrong but correcting them would be a felony. Every one of the Queens has a forbidden second magic buried deep—until an assassin golem forces Tovah to unleash hers.
She thinks she got away with it. Then Nikolai Azarov shows up.
Vancouver’s only golem maker would call her story creative if he wasn’t too busy calling BS. Worse, once he figures out what she actually did to that golem, he doesn’t turn her in. He names his price.
Now Tovah must honor a dangerous bargain with a man who’s already insufferable without leverage, outmaneuver the magic cops circling her agency, and hunt down whoever left a hand-delivered clay effigy on her bed.
Middle age isn’t a crisis. It’s a weapon.
Perfect for fans of paranormal women’s fiction, slow-burn romance with banter, and found family who’d help you hide a body.
Review
Golem for Broke by Deborah Wilde is a magical-midlife urban fantasy that transforms menopause, female friendship and Jewish folklore into the foundations of a fast, irreverent and surprisingly thoughtful supernatural mystery. Tovah Silver is a forty-something professional fixer whose hot flushes manifest as formidable fire magic (an ability she cannot afford to expose to the authorities). When a crudely reconstructed golem attacks her during a mammogram, Tovah and her fellow fixers at Mad Queens Inc. begin an unofficial investigation involving stolen golem parts, escalating community tensions and someone determined to ensure that she does not survive long enough to uncover the truth.
Wilde establishes Tovah’s personality wonderfully from the opening scene, in which she must fight for her life while topless and trapped against a mammography machine. Her narration is sharp, self-aware and unapologetically adult, but the humour never makes her feel frivolous or incapable. She is divorced, sexually confident, fiercely protective and still wrestling with family history, professional insecurity and powers she does not entirely understand. Most refreshing of all is the way the novel treats middle age: Tovah and her friends have not become invisible or faded into the background; they have become stranger, stronger and far more dangerous than anyone expects.
The friendship between Tovah, Nisha, Margot and Jinny gives the story its emotional centre. Each woman possesses an ability that initially appears inconvenient or faintly ridiculous, yet together they discover how devastating those supposedly lesser powers can be. Their loyalty, banter and instinctive understanding of one another make Mad Queens Inc. feel like both a business and a chosen family. Tovah’s antagonistic chemistry with golem-maker Nikolai Azarov is equally entertaining, although the novel’s most compelling relationship is ultimately the one between a creator and the sentient beings entrusted to his care.
Beneath its jokes, magical skirmishes and romantic tension, the novel raises genuinely interesting questions about personhood, free will and responsibility. Wilde’s golems are not convenient supernatural weapons; they possess individual personalities, attachments and an awareness of their own purpose. This gives the central mystery an emotional and moral complexity that becomes particularly powerful towards the conclusion. The Jewish magical traditions, Vancouver setting and political friction between supernatural authorities and frightened communities also lend the world a distinctive identity without overwhelming its contemporary energy.
The novel’s sheer abundance occasionally works against the investigation. Political tensions, family grievances, romantic complications, secondary cases and a rapidly expanding supernatural cast all compete for attention, especially through the middle, when the central golem mystery could exert a firmer hold. A little compression, and allowing some of the rapid-fire banter to end one line sooner, would give the more vulnerable moments additional room to resonate. The main case nevertheless reaches a satisfying and unexpectedly moving resolution, while the final revelation opens a larger series mystery without diminishing what has already been accomplished. Fierce, funny and emotionally intelligent, Golem for Broke is an immensely promising beginning to the Mad Queens Inc. series and a welcome celebration of women discovering that midlife may be when their real power finally begins.
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