Shell Game

Oliver Tree had spent his retirement years working out a solution to the Lost Illusion. Now, at last, he was about to give a death-defying performance in a sell-out festival of magicians in Manhattan. In front of a live audience and the television cameras, four crossbow arrows were fired at their human target. The screams were real, and tragically for Oliver Tree, so was the blood. Even if Charles Butler, cousin of the late great Max Candle who had invented the Lost Illusion was convinced along with eight million viewers that the trick had simply gone wrong. Detective Sgt Kathy Mallory knew instinctively that this was murder. A murder, curiously, that might be linked with the death of a woman half a century ago. . . .