Greer Macallister's debut novel, The Magician's Lie, opens with a murder: the husband of the Amazing Arden, a famous female stage magician, is found dead beneath the stage on which his wife just performed, and Arden is nowhere to be found. When she is spotted miles away by Virgil Holt, an injured policeman, he takes her into custody--where she spends hours insisting she's innocent. Intrigued, he asks for her explanation of what happened. Instead, he receives an account of Arden's life, starting with her days on a farm in Tennessee, building to her work as a traveling magician and star of her own show.
The Magician's Lie moves back and forth between a third-person narration of the magician held for questioning and Arden's first-person recollections, as she chronicles her life in order to save it. At times, these jumps can be jarring, though it is easy to believe that this was Macallister's intent; Holt's questions shake Arden out of her reveries and Arden's insistent storytelling pulls Holt back into her past. Combined, the two points of view reveal magic and illusion, romance and lost loves, murder and intrigue, and Macallister captures the whimsy and wonder of the traveling magic shows of the 20th century with stunning detail. At the heart of everything lies a woman whose tale of her own life does not match the vicious and cruel picture Holt has imagined; both he and the reader must decide what of Arden's story is the truth and what is a lie. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm