HERE ARE THE INCREDIBLE WIMSEYS:

Lord Paul Wimsey, 18th century England's answer to Henry David Thoreau, who spent his life chronicling the melodies of the mistle-thrush and the underground tracks of the burying beetle.

Marguerite la Saure, a woman of the fieriest passions, whose red hair was only once in her life outshone -- by the fire in which she was burned as a witch.

The Duke of Denver, circa Elizabeth 1, a little-known gentleman playwright who may have authored a number of plays attributed to the much more well-known writer named Shakespeare.

Mother Mary of the Immaculate Conception, a nun who, in 1632, sailed with a shipload of nuns and lepers to a paradise somewhere in the South Seas.

Mortimer Wimsey, the Hermit of the Wash, who thought himself one of the fish netted by St. Peter and who one day as he saw Christ walking toward him across the waters of the Atlantic went out to meet him without the benefit of a boat.

Behind every great man, there stands an equally great family and Lord Peter Wimsey's family is no exception. On the Wimsey family tree there blossomed some of the British Empire's most extraordinary men and women, stretching as far back as that colorful trip across the Channel known as the Norman Conquest. Gleaned from the witty and imaginative letters of Dorothy L. Sayers and the fertile annals of English history and fancy, THE WIMSEY FAMILY is a marvelous excursion into the days of yore which uncovers the age-old mystery -- whencesoever did Lord Peter spring and how the devil did he get so clever?