Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

Dellaria Wells is a fire witch with more debts than clients, scraping by on petty cons in the port city of Leiscourt. When a noblewoman needs bodyguards ahead of her wedding, Delly talks her way onto the job. Her new crew is just as unlikely: a necromancer who dotes on birds, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and a reanimated mouse named Buttons, who is in a permanent bad mood.

The threat Delly assumed was overblown turns real fast. An attack leaves a body behind, and murder pulls her into Leiscourt's underworld, tangled with a drug called drip. Behind it sits a conspiracy built on undead magic. The case puts her constantly beside Winn, another guard on the team, well bred and warmer than Delly expects the rich to be.

Delly is used to being the poor woman in the room, quick with a lie and quicker to expect the worst of people who outrank her. Winn keeps not fitting that expectation. The closer the two of them get to whoever is behind the killings, the harder it gets for Delly to keep her guard up around her.

It is a fantasy adventure with a comic, Pratchett-flavored voice that does not flinch at what it costs to be poor in a magical city. Underneath the plot runs a slow-building romance between two women on opposite sides of Leiscourt's class line.