In between, Carter meets the love of his life, a tough-cookie redhead named Annabelle, and tangles with a well-meaning but misguided Secret Service agent named Jack Griffin, who is convinced that Carter is responsible for the death of President Harding. Gold takes us from Charles Carter's first magic show (performed for a household servant during the great San Francisco blizzard of 1897, when 9-year-old Charles and his younger brother James find themselves snowbound in their home with no parental supervision) to a thrilling conclusion, set in 1923, in which Carter delivers the greatest performance of his life. The artfulness of ''Carter Beats the Devil'' rests both in Gold's ability to unfurl a story before our eyes and in his crackerjack skill at recapturing a lost era. But at the heart and center of Gold's tale of intrigue, adventure, love and, of course, magic, is Charles Carter, a character based on the real-life magician Carter the Great, a fairly well-known practitioner of the craft during its golden age, from the 1890's to the 1920's.
Harding, and the invention of television by an unassuming but brilliant Utah farm boy by the name of Philo T. Gold's story enfolds a number of historical incidents, including the mysterious death of the philandering and scandal-ridden President Warren G. His book, which is a work of fiction built around a framework of real-life characters and events, is simply a grand story told well, in plain language that glows with bare-bones elegance. There's no fancy writing in Glen David Gold's first novel, ''Carter Beats the Devil.'' Gold isn't out to wow us with excruciatingly turned phrases, painstakingly stripped-down and juiceless language, excessive self-consciousness disguised as insight or with any other brand of writing-workshop hokum.
Sometimes the most entertaining novels, like the best magic tricks, are deceptively simple.
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