Description:

The Illusionist is the sensuous and haunting tale of Dean Lily, an amateur magician whose arrival in Sparta, New York, upsets the landscape of this small town on the wane. Dean, a master of the sleight of hand, is also a master of seduction and charm—which becomes apparent as he woos and wins the hearts of more than one of Sparta's female citizens.

But the enigmatic newcomer has more to hide than the tricks of his trade—his mysterious identity as a transgendered person, and his closely guarded privacy arouse suspicion and jealousy—and while he cures Sparta of its midwinter ennui, he also unleashes a destructive force that rocks the foundations of this town to its core. Inspired in part by a true story, The Illusionist is a fiercely erotic novel that thwarts conventions of gender and love.

**

From Library Journal

Dean Lily, amateur magician and androgynous scoundrel, drifts into the economically depressed, drug-infested town of Sparta, New York. The townspeople are both mesmerized and repelled by Dean's blurry gender and his ease in wooing and wounding one faithful young woman after another, each of whom swears he is the most tender of manly lovers. Of course, he is not. Dean Lily, born Lily Dean, was miserable as a girl until she found some psychosexual peace once she started binding her breasts and dressing and acting as a man. In Sparta, Dean enrages a pair of drunken lowlifes who, desperate to show an old girlfriend that Dean is a fraud, rape and threaten to kill him if he goes to the police, thus setting in motion the inevitable tragedy. Based loosely on a true hate crime in Humboldt, Nebraska, Smith's novel is a deeply disturbing and provocative study not only of the transsexual psyche but of the meaning of romantic love and its attendant powers of denial.?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

The unfathomable mysteries of sexual identity and charisma permeate this dark, meditative tale of a transsexual's murder in upstate New York, by the author of The Hard Rain (1980) and Remember This (1989)--inspired by an actual incident in Nebraska. It's a chilly October night in quiet Sparta, New York, when Chrissie, a local community-college student, first spots Dean Lily performing magic tricks at the local bar. Though the regulars can't help but gather around the magician's table, there's something about this slight, bright-eyed stranger that makes them vaguely uncomfortable. As Chrissie learns once Dean, who's been living in his truck, gratefully moves into her downtown apartment, Dean Lily is really Lily Dean--a man born in a woman's body about 20 years ago in another small town near the Canadian border. Surprisingly, Chrissie doesn't care much that Dean is physically female. For reasons this plain, boyfriendless part-time nursing-home employee can't begin to fathom, she's too strongly attracted to Dean's emotional intensity, butterfly-like elusiveness, and essential strangeness to judge him according to the usual standards. Instead, she watches uneasily as he seduces her boss at the nursing home--a gawky single mother just barely surviving in a shack outside town- -and then mischievously helps him betray his lover by setting up a meeting with the famously unattainable local beauty queen. With each encounter, Dean touches on sexual needs and primal passions previously buried deep beneath the surface of his partners' monotonous daily life--so effectively, in fact, that little time passes before one man's jealous rage and sexual terror explode to destroy Dean and devastate the people who claim to love him most. Smith's harsh but deadly accurate evocation of late-20th- century rural life almost upstages the violent drama in the foreground. Still, both prove memorable in this haunting exploration of a senseless and brutal murder. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.