Magic and Memory 
 Readers who know Steven Galloway from his beautiful 
 Cellist of Sarajevo 
 will not find anything of its poetry or political relevance here. But Galloway does not attempt that. This is a fast-moving historical novel full of color and detail, and encapsulating a narrative mystery of its own. I read it in a single day (aided by long periods in doctors' waiting rooms) and could not put it down. Besides, with a novel whose short prologue ends "I didn't just kill Harry Houdini; I killed him twice," who could resist? 
 Before I started, I had only a general impression of Houdini's career as a magician and escape artist, and am glad that I didn't check further until afterwards. For Galloway's account of how a Jewish immigrant named Ehrich Weisz became the great Houdini is fascinating, as are his accounts of his various tricks and growing theatrical successes in North America and Europe. He is especially good on the psychology of illusion, how making a person believe one thing is a carefully-prepared matter of suggestion and misdirection. In this version, Houdini soon finds himself working for the American Secret Service and a parallel organization in Britain; I felt slightly less comfortable when the action moves to matters of political intrigue in the Romanov court, but Galloway does a fine job of taking known facts and extrapolating between the lines. 
 Galloway begins his account of Houdini's career with an episode in which he tricks a grieving couple by pretending he has a message from their recently deceased child. Almost immediately, he rejects this lapse in judgment, and at the end of his career he mounts a national campaign to debunk fraudulent spiritualists. This also is part of the record, as is his break with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who (as readers of Julian Barnes' 
 Arthur & George 
 will know) was a committed advocate for spiritualism. Here, though, Galloway's extrapolations just seemed too fantastic for me, smacking too much of paranoia in the Dan Brown mode. 
 At least half the book is taken up, however, by chapters involving a totally different character, Martin Strauss. We see him in a neurologist's office at the start of the book, and continue to follow him for the next few hours, interspersed with flashbacks to a much earlier time. His story does not seem to hang together in literal terms, and we may suspect some magic realism. But the connection between Strauss and Houdini requires no magic when it is revealed, though it is an astounding piece of authorial chutzpah. In a different kind of novel, it could even have been profoundly moving. In this one, let's just say it gives a new twist to the concept of Unreliable Narrator, and that is enough for me.