The Tell-Tale Corpse: An Edgar Allan Poe Mystery

Ever since childhood Edgar Allan Poe has seen things that are not there heard voices others cannot and felt utterly at home in the realm of human darkness. In Harold Schechters intriguing suspenseful and delightfully wicked mystery series Poe makes the perfect hero to unravel cases of the murderous and the macabre. The Tell-Tale Corpse begins as Poe pays a visit to his old friend P. T. Barnum who implores the wordsmith to travel to Boston to secure for Poes wife an urgent medical cureand to acquire some particularly garish crime-scene evidence for Barnums popular cabinet of curiosities the so-called American Museum. The crime in question is the recent butchery of a beautiful young shopgirl. Once in Boston Poe makes an immediate deduction: The sensational murder is only one in a string of inexplicable killingsthe center of a single shadowy pool of deceit and ghoulish depravity. Several deaths later Poe finds himself leading a frantic investigation with the assistance of a highly unusual girl named Louisa May Alcott who has literary ambitions of her ownand whose innocence belies her own fascination with the dark side. As his wifes health falters and a city panics Poe pursues a strange circle of suspects. He must now see what others cannot: the invisible bonds that tie together seemingly unrelated casesand the truth that lies behind a serial murderers ghastly disguise. From a cameo by the narcoleptic Henry David Thoreau to a charming portrait of the four Alcott sisters at home in Concord The Tell-Tale Corpse brings to life nineteenth-century New York and Boston and a world of intellectuals charlatans discoverers dupes daguerreotypists and amateur morticians. As Poe comes closer to unraveling the fiendish riddle the poet must admit at last that he is up against a fellow geniusa genius not of words but of death.