Oscar Wilde Mystery

London, 1889. Oscar Wilde, celebrated poet, wit, playwright, and raconteur is the literary sensation of his age. All Europe lies at his feet. Yet when he chances across the naked corpse of sixteen-year-old Billy Wood, posed by candlelight in a dark stifling attic room, he cannot ignore the brutal murder. With the help of fellow author Arthur Conan Doyle he sets out to solve the crime-but it is Wilde's unparalleled access to all degrees of late Victorian life, from society drawing rooms to the underclass, that will prove the decisive factor in the investigation of what turns out to be a series of brutal killings. Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance is a classic murder mystery in the tradition of Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle.

I see murder in this unhappy hand... When Mrs. Robinson, palmist to the Prince of Wales, reads Oscar Wilde's hand, she cannot know what she has predicted. Nor can Oscar know what he has set in motion when, that same evening, he proposes a game of "murder" in which each of his Sunday Supper Club guests must write down those whom they would like to kill. The fourteen "victims" begin to die mysteriously, one by one, and in the order in which their names were drawn from the bag. With growing horror Wilde and his confidants, Robert Sherard and Arthur Conan Doyle, realize that one of their guests that evening must be the murderer. In a race against time, Wilde will need all his powers of deduction and knowledge of human behavior before he himself-the thirteenth name on the list-becomes the killer's next victim.

Paris, 1883. Oscar Wilde, aged twenty-seven, has come to the city of decadence to discover its charms, to rekindle his friendship with the divine Sarah Bernhardt, and to collaborate with France's most celebrated actor-manager, Edmond La Grange. Oscar discovers dark secrets lying at the heart of the La Grange company, and is confronted by murders both foul and bizarre. To solve the crimes, to unravel the mystery, Oscar risks his life-and his reputation-embarking on a dangerous adventure that takes him from bohemian night clubs to an asylum for the insane, from a duel in the Buttes de Chaumont to the gates of Reading Gaol.