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Abracadabra is a fantastical and inventive addition to the tradition of noir writing, which not only delights and surprises at every turn but also raises important questions about identity, the human condition, the nature of evil, and the state of the union. The novel begins with a mystery, when Mark Goodson, a seemingly well-adjusted married man, disappears during a magic act, precipitating a series of events, encounters, and seemingly inexplicable occurrences, which it falls to a former professional football player, Elko Wells, to weave together into a story that is at once compelling and true. The concussion that ended Wells’ playing career left him open to hearing voices and discerning patterns of meaning helpful to his work as the owner of a missing-persons agency. He also owns a celebrity look-alike agency, which complicates matters in humorous ways, and his reliance on a string of cocktail waitresses called the Bloody Marys who are on the lookout for various people adds another level of intrigue.
 
Magicians and misdirection, gambling, down-on-one’s-luck, the crazed sense of possibility and impossibility, mistaken identity, impersonators and body doubles, people acting bizarrely with all sorts of chaos, collisions, and overlaps thrown in for good measure. Again and again the reader is swept into treacherous waters, always confident that the writer is in control of his material. Because the many twists and turns the plot takes are all but impossible to anticipate, the experience of reading Abracadabra is deliciously magical.

"Stories turn corners. They bump into you: You take them!" So New York writer Benjamin Kohlman has been told by one of many former bosses. Alone again and desperate, Kohlman has finally found his: Janice Stewart, recently acquitted of the grisly arson/murder of her father-in-law. Kohlman follows Janice to Las Vegas where she works as a keno runner. Anxious to start his book, Kohlman offers Janice, now known as Angel, a contract. The elusive, innocent Angel construes it as a marriage contract, and Kohlman's bizarre adventures begin.

Mysteriously treated like a high-roller in the casinos, Kohlman is beaten, stabbed, and shot. His wounds are salved by a doctor and his wife who offer a kinky interpretation of the Hippocratic oath. A black messianic boxer known as Challenger teaches Kohlman the meditative art of psychokinesis, and together they perform amazing feats. Angel, who introduces the resistant Kohlman as her husband, loves him with an unconditional devotion he has never known.

But after all his trials, Kohlman may be redeemed through shedding his own blood and through his growing love for Angel. Western Literature Series.

 Objects easily appear and disappear in Peck’s hands, and so do people. “Into the void,” the young magician writes on a sheet of paper. “What’s supposed to happen doesn’t” and “What’s not supposed to happen does.” That’s all the sense he can make of life, and the uncertainty produces hilarious results. The “theory of failed expectations”—if you can’t control the outcome, then roll with it. And roll he does, all the way to Puerto Villarta, Corfu, and Paris—letting life come to him rather than searching for the “divination of secrets.” In the end, he finds both.

“For the record, I am in this book and you are in this book. When they make the movie, it’s going to feature everybody. David Kranes writes from the marrow, and this novel is fierce and crammed with heart. It’s cerebral and cinematic, and if feels—like all of Kranes’ prose—like something new and something old. A man loves his life in the ways he can, and Peck’s ways are rich. I would say this book is about family and love and time. But it isn’t about something, it is something! If I were with you now, I’d put it in your hand. Wait, fortune, it has already appeared! So, now you’ll see what I mean.” —Ron Carlson, author of A Kind of Flying.

Part of our socialization is the urge-to-perform. We perform images of ourselves for others. If we are successful, we are called on to perform. For some, the urge is so great and the talent sufficient, that we become performers. Performance Art us a book about performers and performances which are extreme. Most of these stories and their performers and performances are at the edge of dream.