Description:
Fans of Caleb Carr's historical mysteries will lap up this well-told tale of murder, mayhem, poetry, prose, and political corruption in mid-19th- century New York. The poetry and prose comes from Edgar Allan Poe, the mayhem from young Augie Dubbins, a street urchin befriended by Poe when he leads the writer to the body of a murdered girl trapped under a pier in the Hudson River. The unlikely duo join forces, visiting the darkest, dirtiest slums and opium dens of the city as well as its glittering mansions to track down the story behind the death of Mary Rogers, a shop girl whose connection with the power brokers of the city is at the heart of this literary mystery. Augie's love for Poe, who seems like the father he never had, drives the narrative as strongly as the inner demons that beset the struggling poet, encountered here a decade before his final descent into the darkness he so brilliantly depicted. Although Poe's death is foreshadowed here (the story is told from the perspective of an Augie grown old after his own career as a writer), it doesn't detract from the immediacy of the story or the emotional resonance of the relationship between an unlikely pair of heroes this reader strongly hopes to meet again. --Jane Adams
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