Escaping from Houdini

About Escaping from Houdini

Audrey Rose Wadsworth boards an ocean liner and finds murder waiting: a series of carnival-themed killings staged as elaborate spectacles, connected to the ship's entertainment company — a troupe of performers led by the mesmerist and escapologist Harry Houdini — and someone on board is ensuring each death looks like an act of theater. Escaping from Houdini is the third book in Kerri Maniscalco's Audrey Rose Wadsworth series, and it is the most stylistically distinctive volume in the sequence. The ocean liner setting is used to maximum effect: the world is contained, the suspect pool is deliberately bounded, and the performances that frame each murder give Maniscalco room to write in a heightened theatrical register suited to her prose. The historical Houdini is rendered as a figure of genuine fascination rather than a cameo — his actual methods, philosophy, and professional reputation are woven into the narrative rather than used as name recognition — and his presence complicates the dynamic between Audrey Rose and Thomas in ways the series has been moving toward across two volumes. The romance subplot in this installment is the most turbulent in the series, and the tension Maniscalco creates between Audrey Rose's feelings and her circumstances is handled with emotional specificity that elevates what could have been a standard love triangle into something with actual character stakes. The murders themselves are the series' most theatrical: each staged death is a puzzle with internal logic that feels genuinely constructed rather than reverse-engineered to produce a particular outcome for the detective. The Gothic atmosphere is maintained through different materials than in the first two books — rather than fog and castles, Maniscalco uses the uncanny quality of performance itself, the blurred line between illusion and reality that carnival has always created. Escaping from Houdini is the series at its most stylistically adventurous.

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