The Cloisters by Katy Hays

 The Cloisters is a thriller set in the library of New York City's Cloisters museum (a beautiful place; I've been twice), amongst medievalists and researchers who are trying to piece together the occult history of tarot cards. Although it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on, it was a fun, interesting read. Normally I'd give it a quick blurb in one of my round-up posts, but underneath the murders and secrets lies an interesting discussion of fate and free will that inspired me to write more.

The two main characters, protagonist and antagonist, represent two sides of an age-old argument about how much control people have over their lives. Because of a tragedy in her past, the protagonist, Ann, has come to believe that unchangeable, unavoidable fate rules life; the antagonist, on the other hand, believes in free will, that people make their own fate. This is an interesting inversion of the usual dynamic in this sort of story; usually it's the hero who advocates for free will and the villain who couches his nefarious plans in the language of fate and inevitability.

The tragedy in Ann's background, which I won't spoil here, is what has caused her to believe a person has no control over one's life, but while her thought process is understandable, it's also deeply flawed. Yes, little, inconsequential choices made on a fateful day led to a terrible event, but it's a mistake to think that negative consequences invalidate the existence of those choices in the first place. Sometimes our choices will be bad, and sometimes they will lead to something bad through sheer luck or bad timing, but we still made those choices, and we will continue to make more (not least in how we choose to respond to tragedy!). 

This issue of fate versus free will obviously ties in to the use of tarot cards to predict the future, which is the McGuffin in this story (and I would have liked more about the tarot deck in question, despite not believing in them as divinatory devices), but it was interesting to see it play out in an unexpected way.