Today’s Riot Rundown is sponsored by David Kranes, abracadabra, University of Nevada Press.
Abracadabra begins with Mark Goodson, a seemingly well-adjusted married man, disappearing during a magic act. It falls to a former professional football player, Elko Wells, to uncover the far darker story of Mark’s marriage and family and weave together a story at once compelling and true. Magicians and misdirection, gambling, down-on-one’s-luck, the crazed sense of possibility and impossibility, mistaken identity, impersonators and body doubles, people acting bizarrely with all sorts of chaos, and overlaps thrown in for good measure. The twists this plot takes are all but impossible to anticipate. Reading Abracadabra is deliciously magical.