Moreover, as the story progresses, it shifts too rapidly from one character to another, one scene to another, one period to another, effectively cooling down any tension the lengthy narrative may have built up.Ī wildly ambitious performance from a first-novelist who has all the tricks in his bag-but just doesn’t know how to use them yet.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. But too often Gold lets his research become his tale when it should simply inform it storytelling and character development grind to a halt under the weight of all that imparted knowledge. He often historical data to set a scene to wonderful effect, describing in detail, for example, the strange and elaborate mechanisms magicians used to make bodies disappear and devils fly.
It’s very clear that the author himself is enchanted by the history of magic. Woven throughout is his suspicious involvement in Harding’s death, which he can never shake, along with a rather odd federal agent, who dogs him every step of the way. After Carter turns his back on Yale and hits the vaudeville trail, eager to learn his craft, we follow him through the defeats of rival magicians, a meeting with Houdini, the early development of television, and on to his arrival at the pinnacle of the profession. Should he let the country in on it? From here, Gold backtracks to Carter’s early life in upper-middle-class, turn-of-the-century San Francisco, a period and place he lovingly re-creates.
Indeed, the depressed Harding and the mysterious Carter even had an opportunity for a chat, in which, supposedly, Harding confided to Carter that he knew a terrible secret. Debut historical, based on the real life of magician Charles Carter, that manages to get several balls in the air at once, only to let them drop along the way.Īccording to Gold’s account, President Warren Harding’s death in 1923 came only hours after he attended, and participated in, one of Carter’s performances.
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