Finding a rare zucchini-colored crayon leads twelve-year-old River Monroe and his friends on an adventure with their eccentric neighbor to save Earth from invading interstellar storm troopers.

Lovable everyman Lew Fonesca, the man who makes things work in Sarasota, takes on the cases of seventeen-year-old Ronnie Graeill accused of bludgeoning to death a local curmudgeon who has been campaigning to end state-sponsored school funding and a semi-retired and much beloved singer of children's songs who is being blackmailed.

Upon learning that her deceased mother, an artist, went through a "Purple Period," ten-year-old Noonie decides to do the same, hoping that this will bring her archaeologist father home to see her win a school art contest and that the aunt, uncle, and cousin she lives with will come to understand her just a little.

"An eccentric detective and her long-suffering assistant untangle a web of magic, deceit, and murder in a fantasy reimagining of the classic crime novel"-- "In Daretana's grandest mansion, an Imperial officer lies dead -- killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire's borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it's a death both terrifying and impossible....