The Escape Artist

by Brad Meltzer
434 pgs

It’d been several years since I read a book by Brad Meltzer. I’m not 100% positive why I stopped reading them, but if my memory serves me, I had had enough of his eye-roll-inducing dialogue and decided to give up on him. So, I’m not sure what possessed me to picked up The Escape Artist to see what it was about. When I read the summary, and learned that Meltzer focused his “decoded” lens on Harry Houdini, I thought I’d give him another try.

The action begins right out of the gate, with a small plane going down somewhere over the Alaskan wilderness. One of its passengers, a young woman, has just enough time to write a small note and swallow it before dying in the crash.

The story then moves to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, where Army mortician Jim Zigarowski (Zig) prepares the bodies of U.S. military personnel for burial. He’s the best there is, the one called on for the most difficult jobs of reconstructing facial features and giving the family the opportunity to see their loved ones one last time. When he sees the names of the bodies that just arrived from Alaska, one of them hits too close to home: Nola Brown. Nola was a friend of his own daughter, who died tragically years ago. Zig has never gotten over her death and feels that by doing what he can to repair Nola’s body he will be honoring the memory of his daughter.

When Zig finds the brief note in the woman’s stomach, he discovers that the woman isn’t Nola Brown. He also realizes that the real Nola is still alive, and in terrible danger. It’s up to Zig to discover who wanted Nola dead, and why. Along the way he uncovers a top-secret organization, one whose origins tie back to Harry Houdini, and the suspected role he played as a spy for the U.S. and British governments before World War I.

Overall, I enjoyed The Escape Artist. The characters are solid and the story is entertaining. I even thought the dialogue was a marked improvement from the last of Meltzer’s books I read. Maybe I’ll have to put Meltzer back on my radar.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆