At the pinnacle of her career, an early 20th-century magician known as the Amazing Arden astonishes the world by sawing a man in half onstage — or at least appearing to do so. “Who is this Amazing Arden?” the headlines ask.
Greer Macallister’s atmospheric novel tells the story of this fictional magician, whose talents make her one of the world’s most famous female masters of illusion. It’s a tale as spellbinding as any of Arden’s performances, with plenty of smoke and mirrors to confound and misdirect the reader.
“The Magician’s Lie” opens in 1905. Arden is preparing to dazzle an audience in Waterloo, Iowa, with her “Halved Man” trick. She will saw a man in half, blood will spurt from the wooden box in which he lies, and she will put him back together again. But this time she switches out the saw for an ax. “Tonight, I will escape my torturer, once and for all time. Tonight, I will kill him,” she confesses to the reader. (Her tormentor isn’t named, but who he is and what he has done to her are horrifying when finally revealed.)
Later that night, a man’s body, an ax buried in his chest, is found under the stage. The police’s prime suspect in the death is, not surprisingly, the Amazing Arden. The victim is said to be her husband. Arden flees Waterloo but is soon captured by a police officer.
‘The Magician’s Lie’ by Greer Macallister is a spellbinding tale...Washington Post 2015
"Macallister is as much of a magician as her subject, misdirecting and enchanting while ultimately leaving her audience satisfied with a grand finale." -- Columbus Dispatch
"Greer Macallister's haunting first novel is a compelling mystery.... [her] painstaking descriptions of the costumes, technique and trickery involved in Ada’s work as an illusionist are unparalleled." -- BookPage review
"And for its next trick, the novel 'The Magician’s Lie' by Greer Macallister just might become a hit." -- The Christian Science Monitor