When Fletcher "Red" Brandon, a moderately successful Oxford stage magician also known as Peter Prestige, meets lovely young Rosa Kelly in a pub one night, he seduces her with a magic trick. She moves in with him the next day. Not quite a year later, she dies mysteriously shortly after leaving him, never having really revealed anything about herself. Brandon is shattered, not only with grief, but by the awareness that he never really knew her. Slowly but decisively, he begins to unravel the little mysteries of who she was, why she might have been murdered, and why she loved him yet chose to disappear. Author Martyn Bedford does a masterful, impressively unconventional job of suffusing The Houdini Girl with very real magic; not the inexplicable romantic magic which defies all logic, but the nuts-and-bolts card-trick type which ultimately relies on misplaced trust, lies of omission, and outright deceptions. As the reader follows Brandon through London's pub scene and the Amsterdam red-light district, and among a cast of generally unreliable characters, the narrator, true to theme, proves to be not so much unreliable as he is unwilling to show the reader the complete picture. As he learns more about the secretive Rosa Kelly, and slowly and reluctantly divulges more about himself, The Houdini Girl evolves from a clever little mystery into a rich, involving, elegant exploration of the many levels of honesty and the nature of truth itself.