Here is an extraordinary tour de force of narrative suspense, historical realism, and surreal enchantment, a novel that rivals its hero's greatest tales as, with phantasmagorical power, it spins its story on two separate but inexorably converging levels. On the one, we are in a superbly evoked nineteenth-century America, as Edgar Allan Poe tells of his nightmare youth, of his obsession with the thirteen-year-old first cousin whom he makes his child bride, of his public triumphs and his private demons.

On the other, we are with a phantom Poe living and loving in a Paris viewed through the tinted glasses of his fictional detective, the immortal C. Auguste Dupin. Indeed, Dupin comes very much alive in these pages as he tracks Poe to America, bringing with him the icy logic bestowed upon him by his creator. Even as Poe lays bare the intimate details of his life, Dupin pitilessly exposes secrets of the psyche that are the keys to the ultimate mystery of self - and self-damnation.

This is a detective story, a tale of horror, of adventure, of the sea, of fantasy, metaphysics, disintegrating personality, blighted love... all the threads of Poe's unique body of work woven together to meet his last and greatest challenge, the reinvention of himself.