Edgar Allan Poe and The London Monster
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- USD 4.99
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- USD 4.99
Descripción editorial
Summer, 1840. Edgar Allan Poe arrives in London to meet his friend C. Auguste Dupin, in the hope that the great detective will help him solve a family mystery. For Poe has inherited a mahogany box containing sheathes of letters that implicate his grandparents in some of London’s most heinous and scandalous crimes – those committed by the so-called London Monster who, for two years, terrorized the city’s streets, stalking attractive, well-to-do young women, slicing their clothing and their derrières.
Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to accept that his grandparents – actors who struggled to make a living on the London stage – led a clandestine and nefarious double life, Poe and Dupin set out to prove the missives forgeries. But as they delve deeper into the city’s secrets, and past horrors emerge, they start to suspect that they too are being watched and preyed upon. And if they are, might their stalkers be connected to the London Monster?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Street's impressive first novel cleverly pairs Poe with his fictional creation, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. In 1840, Poe travels to England after receiving a parcel from his stepmother containing a bundle of letters that appear to implicate Poe's maternal grandparents in a series of real-life crimes committed decades earlier. Between 1788 and 1790, women were terrorized by the so-called London Monster, who cut "the derri res of over fifty victims." Though a man was eventually charged with the crimes, doubt lingered about his guilt, leaving room for Poe to wonder whether his mother's parents, actors Elizabeth and Henry Arnold, might have actually been responsible for them. Poe's friend Dupin meets him in London to sort out the truth about the past and about the person who's stalking him in the present. That foe seems to have almost supernatural abilities, having somehow gotten hold of a letter Poe wrote his wife that was tossed overboard during his transatlantic voyage. Street maintains atmospheric suspense throughout.