At the birth of the Jazz Age in San Francisco, the magician Charles Carter walks on to the stage of the Curran Theatre for the most daring performance of his life. Two hours later, President Warren G Harding will be dead.
The mysterious death of President Harding in 1932 is only the curtain raiser to this extraordinary novel of magic and science. Charles Carter is Carter the Great, a name given to him by the supreme showman, Harry Houdini. Carter was born into privilege but became a magician out of need. Only at the moment of the performance, when the audience is brought together by a single experience, can Carter defeat his crippling fear of loneliness.
But with every step into the twentieth century, the stakes are growing higher. Science and cinema are fast outstripping even the master magician and instead of that single magic moment, there is only a headlong rush into an uncertain future.
Glen David Gold's debut novel brings the gathering roar of the 1920s to the page, it is a dazzling and romantic panorama of our modern world at the moment it came into existence.
