It seems to me that the more I read of this series, the more I really enjoy them.

This one is set in 1966, mainly in Brighton but also in London. Magicians on stage, and variety acts, have almost been displaced by television. But someone is murdering magician's assistants and of course there really is only one person who can help in solving this mystery.

The characters are well developed and I enjoyed the story line.

However, you need to start this series at the beginning so that you can appreciate the back stories that contribute to the series. Of course you could read this one as a stand-alone, but will miss so much. ( )

It’s now 1966; Max Mephisto is divorced, his daughter Ruby has a newborn, and murder is once again afoot: a magician’s assistant is murdered in her rooming house and the primary suspect is the magician with whom she worked, Ted English. Max knows that magician, known as the Great Deceiver, and is reluctantly drawn into investigating on his behalf. Meanwhile, Superintendent Edgar Stephens has WDC Meg Connolly working on the case, while his wife Emma and Sam, her partner in a detective agency, are asked by the parents of the murdered woman to investigate as well. With all that talent looking into the crime, one would think it should be quickly solved, but it takes another death before the various parties even begin to look in the right direction….This latest entry in the Brighton mysteries (also known as the Magic Men series) avoids the anachronisms found in its immediate predecessor (“The Midnight Hour”) and there are a lot of nice tidbits about the fading world of traveling variety shows, which by the mid-1960s had been largely supplanted by television. Indeed, some of the characters in this book are former variety performers now working in television; that era is quite nicely captured here. I also continue to enjoy the relationships between the main characters here, which are all advanced a little in this story, but I found there were a few too many magicians and former magicians forming the pool of suspects: they just weren’t differentiated enough for me to keep who was who straight, which resulted in the ending being a bit of a let-down. Still, entertaining enough for a mild recommendation. ( )

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. ( )