Overview

One of Entertainment Weekly's 10 Great Fall Thrillers""Clever, immensely likeable...Captivating."" --The Wall Street Journal In the first installment of a compelling new series by Elly Griffiths featuring Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens and the magnificent Max Mephisto, a band of magicians who served together in World War II track a killer who's performing their deadly tricks. Brighton, 1950. The body of a girl is found cut into three pieces. Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick--the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old war friend of Edgar's. They served together in a shadowy unit called the Magic Men, a special ops troop that used stage tricks to confound the enemy. Max is on the traveling show circuit, touring seaside towns with ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls. He's reluctant to leave this world to help Edgar investigate, but advises him to identify the victim quickly -- it takes a special sidekick to do the Zig Zag Girl. Those words come back to haunt Max when the dead girl turns out to be Ethel, one of his best assistants to date. He's soon at Edgar's side, hunting for Ethel's killer. Another death, another magic trick: Edgar and Max are sure the answer to the murders lies in their army days. And when Edgar receives a letter warning of another ""trick"" on the way -- the Wolf Trap -- he knows they're all in the killer's sights.

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Reviews

"""A labyrinthine plot, a splendid reveal, and superb evocation of the wafer-thin veneer of glamour at the bottom end of showbusiness...Thoroughly enjoyable."" -- ""The Guardian (London)"" ""Enormously engaging...Griffiths's plot is satisfyingly serpentine."" -- ""Daily Mail (London)"""

""A labyrinthine plot, a splendid reveal, and superb evocation of the wafer-thin veneer of glamour at the bottom end of showbusiness...Thoroughly enjoyable."" -- ""The Guardian (London)"" ""Enormously engaging...Griffiths's plot is satisfyingly serpentine."" -- ""Daily Mail (London)""

Author Information

Elly Griffiths is the USA Today bestselling author of the Ruth Galloway and Brighton mystery series, as well as the standalone novels The Stranger Diaries, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; The Postscript Murders; and Bleeding Heart Yard. She is the recipient of the CWA Dagger in the Library Award and the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She lives in Brighton, England. Daniel Philpott trained at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and, after success in the prestigious Carleton Hobbs Award for Radio Drama, has been prolific in BBC Radio and the Spoken Word industry. His theater work includes numerous productions on the London fringe. As an audiobook narrator, he has read George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and numerous others.

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