Description: Fletcher Brandon, a professional magician known as Red, meets Rosa in an Oxford pub, where he impresses and seduces her with a successfully performed trick. But their relationship ends tragically a year later when Rosa dies in a freak accident. A police investigation into her death triggers Red's own search through Rosa's past -- through parental loss, abuse, addiction, and clandestine loyalties -- where he finds himself to be an outsider in his lover's secret history. Red must convince himself that Rosa really has died -- that her disappearance is not merely a final deception -- but ultimately, Red's search will be a revelation not only of reality, but of illusion as well: of the illusions in Rosa's life before he knew her, in their life together, and in what appears to be her afterlife.

Told with marvelously sustained suspense, persuasive conviction, and grace, the Houdini Girl reveals and conceals as it takes us behind the crafted appearance of two performers in love, into a relationship that is both betrayed and vindicated by its gradual exposure. It is a novel as absorbing and skillful in its execution as the performance of a complex magic trick.

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