The Illusion of Murder (Nellie Bly) - Hardcover

McCleary, Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765322048 ISBN 13: 9780765322043

Publisher: Forge Books, 2011

Synopsis

History, mystery, murder and magic accompany Nellie Bly – Victorian Age detective, reporter, and feminist – as she takes up a challenge by Jules Verne to beat the eighty days it took his fictional hero Phileas Fogg to race around the world.  Nellie tackles the journey--alone, with a single change of clothes--against the wishes of her publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, who felt it was “too dangerous for a woman to attempt.” 

In her official account of the journey, Seventy-Two Days Around the World, Nellie leaves out one riveting event: a mysterious death.  In the bustling harbor city of Port Said, she witnesses an event that makes her a target for a killer and involves her in international intrigue with the fate of nations at stake. 

On board the ships that take Nellie from the Land of the Pharaohs to the exotic Orient and across the Pacific are the most famous magicians in the world... but a killer also stalks the decks.  As magicians conjure the fantasy and a spiritualist raises the dead, Nellie wonders if Mr. Pulitzer had underestimated the danger.

About this title

About the Author:

CAROL MCCLEARY was born in Seoul, Korea, and lived in Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines.  She now lives on Cape Cod in an antique house that is haunted by ghosts.  She is currently working on her next Nellie Bly novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

McCleary transforms real-life crusading reporter Nellie Bly into an easily flustered ditz in the sequel to 2010's The Alchemy of Murder. In 1889, as actually happened, Nellie sets out to beat the round-the-world record of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Two weeks into her trip, Bly is horrified to witness a fatal stabbing in Port Said and hears the dying man's last words. Despite her conviction that the victim was English, her traveling companions insist that she's mistaken. The killing may be connected with an effort to drive the British out of Egypt through acts of terror. Bly's escapades continue as she moves on to Asia and the U.S., but her reactions to what befalls her are more in keeping with an out-of-her-depth neophyte than the accomplished and independent woman who successfully faked madness to go undercover at a New York City insane asylum. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0765322048
• ISBN 13: 9780765322043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352