The Houdini Girl

Martyn Bedford's "The Houdini Girl" was on all the major book reviewers' recommended list last season. I can see why. On the surface, HG reads like a none too extraordinary murder mystery. The heroine gets bumped off real early. She leaves behind a grieving and befuddled lover who sleuths away to discover that she had led another life in secret whilst cohabitating with him. As he peels off the layers to unmask her real identity, we are thrown into a nightmarish world of sex abuse, drugs, prostitution, a make believe family history and a sordid past that made Rosa Kelly the damaged person she had become. Her love affair with magician Brendan Fletcher never had a chance. It was doomed from the start because she'd lost her innocence and was in no fit state to accept let alone give love. All in all, pretty unexceptional stuff, you might think, but what elevates HG above the more formularic efforts of others writing in the same genre is Bedford's craft in exquisitely blending the thriller with the human interest elements to produce a novel that is at once gripping, intelligent, touching and believable. His contrasting treatment of the illusionist's magic and Rosa's deliberate deception of Brandon is both poignant and painful. The premise for HG wasn't especially promising but the result is spectacular. The book reviewers were right. HG is a wonderfully entertaining novel you wouldn't want to miss.

I loved this book! Unlike many which fade or disappear from memory shortly after finishing, this one will stay with you. You're hooked from the Prologue, and each chapter closing leaves you with more questions than answers. Yet, as the story progresses, all the loose ends are neatly tied up & the tragic twists and turns seem inevitable. Part mystery, part love story, part erotic thriller -- this is literary fiction at its best!

...this is a tale involving drugs and prostitution. One ought not expect Pollyanna to appear in the dramatis personae.This is, indeed, a genre-breaker--certainly *not* a love story, certainly not (entirely) a mystery. The incessant exploration of what is real and what is illusion is what drives this wonderfully introspective tome ceaselessly forward. One is never quite certain who is deceiving whom.Most books fade from consciousness with nary a whimper. Not this one.

"The characters in Martyn Bedford's persuasive novel will remain vividly in your mind even when you've finished reading about them. The Houdini Girl is an impressive achievement--elegantly crafted, utterly convincing, and deeply felt" -Arthur Golden, author of MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA

The Houdini Girl is definitely my book of the Year. It is a thriller with a murder, or at least an assisted involuntary death, it is also a love story in the Shakespearean mould with double identities confounding the course of love. From the beginning illusion is a theme, even the opening paragraph misleads. Bedford explores the difference between illusion and deceit in a witty, moving and tense novel that gathers pace like the train that the eponymous character leaves with such tragic affect.As the main character (Red, the master prestidigitator) explains, there is a difference between magic and lies which is defined by the relationship between the protagonists. A magician and his audience enter into a conspiracy to sustain an illusion, the magician tricks his audience, who nevertheless know that they are being tricked, therefore there is no lie. Bedford tricked me, too, with this tale. Martyn Bedford is a magician, I looked for the trick behind the illusion but there is none. He just really is that good.