The Girl Behind the Wall: Edgar Allan Poe, the Girl, and the Mysterious Raven Murders
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Did Edgar Allan Poe know more about murder than he revealed in his bizarre stories of murder and mayhem? Was he in fact guilty of killing a girlfriend in a fit of rage many years before he became famous?
Bruce Wetterau’s taut thriller weaves a murder mystery worthy of Poe himself as it follows Poe through actual events in the last months of his life. The year 1849 saw the real-life Poe dealing with his alcoholism, failing health, poverty, and painful memories of his recently deceased child-bride wife. His life had become a psychological pressure cooker, with severe anxiety attacks and bouts of strange hallucinations.
The Girl Behind the Wall opens in early 1849. Poe is being tormented by frightening visions about murdering Annabel Lee while he was a student at the University of Virginia. Afraid ofthe hangman’s noose, Poe knows he can never tell anyone about the repressed memories haunting him. But a newspaper reporter named Sam Reynolds has overheard him talking erratically about Annabel while in a drunken stupor. That a man as famous as Poe could be a murderer would be the scoop of a lifetime and Reynolds will do anything to get it.
Flash forward nearly two hundred years to the present. The book’s hero, Clay Cantrell, accidentally uncovers damning evidence--Annabel’s skeleton and a locket from Poe--behind an old brick wall at the university. While the mystery of Annabel’s murder and Poe’s strange visions unfolds in flashbacks, Cantrell and friends launch a search of their own for the truth about Annabel’s death. But another murder mystery much closer to home overtakes them when a cold-blooded serial killer named the Raven claims his first victim, a UVA coed.
Obsessed with Poe, the Raven stages his murders with clever ties to Poe’s works. Clay tries to stop the murders and soon winds up in the Raven’s cross hairs. Though this isn’t the first vicious killer Clay has fought, he doesn’t know the Raven has a diabolical plan to execute him.
Will Poe finally reveal the truth about Annabel, or will he take the secret to his grave? Can Clay escape the Raven’s plot, find what drives the Raven’s murderous obsession with Poe, and at last answer the question, who killed Annabel Lee?
Customer Reviews
Brilliant self-published book
A brilliant self-published novel. If you love Poe’s writings and a clever mystery, you will find the perfect combination in The Girl Behind the Wall.
The very beginning of the book sets the ambiance: reporter Samuel Reynolds is looking for a man in cold and rainy Manhattan, in 1849. And he finds him: he’s none other than a half-dead drunk and delirious Edgar Allan Poe.
Then we meet Clay Cantrell and his friend Mac doing today a repair job in a tunnel at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. They end up finding a girl walled up. She is still wearing a locket, which contains the words, “My beloved Annabel. Your devoted Eddy. October 1826.”
Could this Eddy be Edgar Allan Poe, as he did spend a year at UVA? And if yes, what’s his connection to this girl? Could he have murdered her and hidden her there?
The plot goes back and forth between Edgar in the final year of his life, and the research done by Clay and Mac to understand who the girl is, and who did that to her. In the process, they are helped by a couple of UVA history teachers.
From his part, reporter Samuel also wants to know why Poe has these crazy hallucinations and keeps mumbling in his delirium about a certain Annabel. If he can prove he killed her, his journalist career would be assured.
Now, if you know well Poe, you may have found that story of a woman walled up familiar, as there’s something similar in his short story The Cask of Amontillado. And the name Annabel I’m sure made you think of one of his famous poems. These are just two of the many examples of how Wetterau so cleverly invented a plot where so many elements of Poe’s life (behavior, health and social condition) and writings find their place.
Things get actually more complicated for the Clay-Mac team, as a girl is murdered on campus. Could this murder be somehow related to Annabel’s death? Of course, they also want to investigate that part, but when they get too close to solving the mystery, the murderer adds them to his list of potential victims.
To make this part more intriguing, the author intersperses passages about the killer aka the Raven (!), and his doings.
I am really impressed by the amount of research the author did on Poe (actually even a character in the book recommends some biographies on him, in chapter 2) and how he managed to invent a complete plot and insert so many elements of Poe’s life and writings in it. It is honestly brilliant. It also invited me to reread a few stories and poems by Poe as I devoured this mystery.
I happened to visit UVA fairly recently, so it was doubly fun to enjoy all the great descriptions of the campus. And that crazy chase scene in chapter 22!!
Clay is from Staunton, a charming city I also visited, and he renovates some of these gorgeous Victorian houses. He even goes to Blackfriars Playhouse, a faithful recreation of Shakespeare’s original indoor theater. A must place to visit if you are in the area. The guide there gave us great explanations.
Besides descriptions of places, the author does a great job at talking about a trendy practice of the time, mesmerism (now better known as hypnotism).
The ending was fabulously done as well, with a very clever solution.
The author included an afterword about facts and fiction in his novel, as well as a timeline about Poe’s last year of his life.
My only regret of this book is that it is self-published, and so it will get a limited readership. If you are among readers still hesitating when you know a book is self-published, please put all your hesitations aside. I repeat, the book is brilliant.