In this latest addition to Elly Griffiths’s Brighton novel series, we have reached 10966, and people are looking forward to the forthcoming World Cup with great excitement. Well, most people. Conjuror and sometime Hollywood star Max Mephisto does not like football much, and courtesy of his mother’s Italian lineage he rather favours Italy over England. As he leaves his luxurious London apartment one morning, he hears his name called out from the street, and finds himself looking at a figure from his past: Ted English, a less accomplished stage magician with whom he worked years ago.

Ted has bad news – Cherry, the ‘glamorous assistant’ from his act, had been found murdered in her accommodation in Brighton. Thinking that he will be prime suspect, Ted English has hunted Max down, knowing that in the past he had been friendly with the head of Brighton’s police force, Superintendent Edgar Stephens. Edgar’s team is indeed investigating the murder, but they are not alone. Edgar’s wife, Emma, who was formerly a police officer but is now a private investigator, has been commissioned to look for the killer by Cherry’s family.

As always, Elly Griffiths engages the reader’s attention right from the start. I always find with her books that I start reading them, and almost without knowing it, I am sixty or seventy pages in, and completely hooked. This was no exception.

She uses a strong cast of principal characters who are all immensely plausible. Edgar plays a relatively small role now – one consequence of his exalted position as Superintendent is that he no longer becomes involved in the minutiae of his team’s cases. Still, he is an empathetic manager, and keen to ensure the welfare of all of his staff. His wife has always been a strong foil to him, and continues to manage the competing demands of investigation and family management. Constable Meg Connolly is also a brilliantly drawn character, offering a source of down to earth common sense to contrast the occasionally more rarefied approach of some of the others. The presence on the fringes of Astarte, a Romany character, adds a similar sprinkle of the esoteric to that cast by Cathbad in the Ruth Galloway books. ( )