Summer Reading

The Bullet Trick

by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 363 pp., $23

As in her 2002 debut The Cutting Room – winner of an award from the Crime Writers' Association – Welsh's second novel follows a situationally ethical protagonist into a seamy underworld of lawlessness, greed, drink, and deception, with a mysterious photograph as its point of entry. William Wilson is a stage magician – a "conjurer," he says – who's palmed an envelope that could contain evidence of a crime. He's also got a new gig at the Schall und Rauch, a Berlin cabaret whose patrons like Grand Guignol and lots of skin. With shady lady Sylvie as his new assistant, can William resist the temptation to pull a deadly new trick? The book is very much a thriller, flashing forward and backward through time and between three cities (London, Berlin, and Glasgow) as it spins its web of intrigue. But the beauty is in Welsh's ability to construct a setting with spare, understated prose – a hardboiled patter successfully transplanted from Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles to dank, whiskey-soaked pubs, where depressive pensioners and other degenerate Glaswegians drink to disappear before the sun has finished rising. You can almost smell the "discount bacon, black pudding the colour of blood-soaked shit and gangrenous battery-farmed eggs" in the breakfast hash. Welsh has been likened to fellow Scots Ian McEwan and A.L. Kennedy, based on the adroitness of her prose and the sense of inexorable doom in her narrative, but The Bullet Trick has a second-act accelerando that Scott Turow would envy. It's a slam-dunk for the thinking reader's beach bag.