Masters of Illusions

With novel after novel, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith has proven to be an American writer of great depth and extraordinary talent. Her stories have the stunning clarity of 20/20 vision that sees the inner forces behind human behavior along with the outer events that shape our world. This newest work, Masters of Illusion, is a stunning accomplishment. With a reporter's eye, Smith re-creates an unforgettable tragedy, the Hartford circus fire of 1944 that left 169 people dead and over a thousand injured.

And with a writer's vision, she tells a moving story about two people who search to find the truth behind the catastrophe - and discover the secrets hidden in their own lives.

Because World War II has sent so many men overseas, the excited crowd gathering at the July 6, 1944, circus matinee to see the Flying Wallendas, clown Emmett Kelly, and the fabulous animal acts of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth are mostly women and children. So are the victims of the fire. Margie Potter is the youngest child to survive, yet she won't even remember the flames that claim her mother's life and leave her own back scarred.

The Hartford fireman she meets and marries eighteen years later, Charlie O'Neill, was only ten the summer of the fire, but the terrifying day has stayed in his mind - so vividly that he can never forget it.

Masters of Illusion is Margie and Charlie's story - a story of investigation, of peeling back the layers of the past to discover what really happened. The fire may have been a tragic accident, no one knows for sure, but Charlie is convinced it was an act of deliberate murder. His and Margie's twenty-five-year hunt for evidence will end up revealing the emotional and physical scars she doesn't even know are there.

And this story of suspense will become a portrayal of a woman's dramatic awakening as she faces the facts of her life and the stripping away of illusions she has embraced throughout her girlhood and marriage.

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's skill makes the reader part of the process, a witness to the fire and its aftermath, to human frailty and transformation. Gradually, what seems like senseless tragedy is tinged with purpose, and the tension builds until the final, chilling page of this brilliantly crafted, deeply beautiful, and wonderfully wise book.