L'écriture de Karen Lee Street est empreinte d'une touche gothique, issue de ses premières années passées dans une vieille ferme grinçante. Ses mystères historiques, acclamés par la critique, mettent en scène les emblématiques Edgar Allan Poe et C. Auguste Dupin alors qu'ils démêlent des crimes déconcertants du passé. Street mêle avec brio atmosphère et suspense, entraînant les lecteurs dans des intrigues complexes qui explorent des énigmes durables et des décors historiques avec une touche stylistique unique.
In this reimagined mystery, Poe and his fictional detective Dupin are friends who solve crimes together. Among anti-immigrant upheaval in Philadelphia in 1844, they are mystified by the arrival of a package of mummified bird parts and a young heiress in distress.
Summer, 1840. Edgar Allan Poe sails from Philadelphia to London to meet his friend C. Auguste Dupin, with the hope that the great detective will help him solve a family mystery. For Poe has inherited a mahogany box containing a collection of letters allegedly written by his grandparents, Elizabeth and Henry Arnold. The Arnolds were actors who struggled to make a living on the London stage, but the mysterious letters suggest that the couple has a more clandestine and nefarious lifestyle, stalking well-to-do young women at night, to slice their clothing and derrieres. Poe hopes to prove the missives forgeries; Dupin wonders if perhaps they are real, but their content fantasy. Soon Poe is being stalked by someone who knows far more about his grandparents and their crimes than he does. And then he remembers disturbing attacks made upon him as a child in London—could the perpetrators be connected?
'And I prayed that I would find a way to tell my most honorable friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, the truth about how I had finally been murdered, and by whom.'