The Houdini girl / Martyn Bedford

Red Brandon, a man in his late 20s, is a professional magician. He meets a mysterious beauty, Rosa Kelly, in a pub and the next day she invites herself to live with him. A year later she is dead as a result of a freak circumstance aboard a train to the Netherlands. Red storms through Europe following the thread of Rosa's past, realizing that he knows almost nothing about her, and works through his grief by trying to determine how and why she died. Although Rosa is inept at learning simple magic tricks, she is, nevertheless, the greater illusionist. The telling of this story is unique in a number of respects. Many chapters begin with the description of a magic act, giving readers all the visual details of the trick, but none of the methods employed. Red uses these illusions as parables to describe the events he is retelling. Sporadically, Rosa tells the story from her vantage point in her own colorful way of speaking. Her narrative is in the present tense. The chronology, then, is in a constant state of flux. It sounds confusing, but the plot holds together well, and the time and narrative changes add to the tale. Readers learn, finally, Rosa's whole tragic story and the driving force behind Red's guilt.