The Beckitts

Spoiler-heavy. The Beckitts' identity and role in the killings are a back-half reveal; if you haven't read past chapter twenty-three, save this page.

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In a sentence

A wealthy Chicago couple — bereaved by the loss of a daughter, quietly furious, and willing to fund and ritually participate in Victor Sells's storm-fed murder spells in exchange for revenge — who are the offstage engine of the book's killings and whose grief makes the book's villainy work.

Who they are in the story

The Beckitts spend most of the book as Linda Randall's employers. They are why Linda is driving the Town Car. They are also, the late chapters reveal, Victor Sells's ritual partners — the "willing intimacy" his working requires, and the wealthy patrons of the ThreeEye distribution operation. Their motive is grief: their daughter died, they blame Marcone's organization for the death, and they have decided that murder by sorcery is a finer instrument of revenge than any other available to them.

They appear directly only at the lake house in chapter twenty-three, in the ritual loft, beside Victor as he works the final spell. They do not survive the climax in the form they entered it. The book leaves the legal aftermath to the closing chapter; Murphy's squad arrests them.

What they're like

The book gives the Beckitts almost no on-page voice. What you get of them is filtered through Linda's quiet body language in chapter ten and through the ritual scene in chapter twenty-three. They are well-mannered. They are discreet. They are not loud about their grief and they are not loud about their plan. Their participation in Victor's workings is the act of a couple who have decided together to step over a line and to step over it precisely, with paperwork in order and the staff paid.

The book treats them with restrained loathing. They are not monsters; they are people who became something monstrous because the loss of their daughter cracked the floor under their lives and they reached for a way down. Storm Front does not redeem them and does not let you forget where they came from.

What they want

Marcone destroyed. Specifically the part of his organization their daughter died inside of. Tommy Tomm was a piece of that. The ThreeEye operation was, in part, a parallel revenge — undermining Marcone's drug-distribution monopoly while building a working pipeline of magical leverage. Their grief was the reason; the leverage was the means.

What they fear / hide

Each other's nerve failing. Victor's binding failing. The Council noticing. Their staff noticing. The full price of what they have done becoming legible to themselves. The book holds all of that off-page; you fill it in from the way Linda Randall looks at her own hands in chapter ten.

Key relationships

• Victor Sells — ritual partner and ally. The sex magic at the core of his working requires willing participants and they are the willing participants.
• Linda Randall — employee. She knows them well enough to be terrified of them by chapter ten.
• Their daughter — dead before the book. Her death is the load-bearing piece of grief the whole thing rests on; the book is intentionally sparse about her, because the Beckitts are not its main subject.
• Marcone — the target. Not because he killed their daughter personally — the book is careful about that — but because his organization is the structural cause of her death in their eyes.

What they look like

The novel does not paint the Beckitts clearly. The Page Posse art for this page therefore renders them as a half-body couple portrait in mourning-precise formalwear — a composite from the role and the period rather than from on-page description. The implied couple: mid-to-late forties, both grief-hollowed and quietly intent. Him: tall and gaunt, salt-and-pepper hair combed back, narrow steel-gray eyes, lined clean-shaven face. Her: roughly his height in heels, slim, light-blond hair pulled back tight in a low chignon, pale ice-blue eyes red-rimmed but dry, a thin mouth.

Both wear tasteful, expensive, mourner-precise dark formalwear. Him: a charcoal three-piece, dark silk tie, polished black oxfords. Her: a long-sleeved black silk knee-length dress, a single black-pearl mourning necklace, a plain wedding band. The two of them stand close enough to brush shoulders.

For your book club

• Storm Front gives the Beckitts almost no voice. Is that a mercy to them, a failure of the book to render them, or a deliberate choice that puts the focus elsewhere?
• Their grief is the book's most morally complicated material. Are you sympathetic to it? Where does the book want you to be?
• The Beckitts and Victor build a closed circuit — money, magic, ritual, distribution — that worked for months before Harry got near it. What does Storm Front think about the danger of patient, well-mannered evil with paperwork in order?
• The novel arrests them at the end and stops. Compare that to the way Victor's death is handled. Is the asymmetry the right call, or does the book duck their reckoning?

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• The Beckitts (canonical — the most common form)
• the Beckitts
• Beckitts
• Mr. Beckitt
• Mrs. Beckitt