Regency England, 1819. Despite the lack of references, Thomas Shield gets a job as a teacher's assistant in a London suburb. Among his students are the young American Edgar Poe, the adopted son of the Allans, and his best friend, the spoiled sissy Charles Frant. The boys are surprisingly similar to each other. . . Thomas falls in love with Charles's beautiful but not too happy mother and gradually gets bogged down in a web of other people's family secrets and intrigues. When a disfigured corpse is found on the outskirts of the capital, all the evidence points to the Frant family. Involuntarily drawn into this complicated story, Shield realizes that he has more than enough reasons to worry. And soon it turns out that a little American is at the center of these terrible events. . . The book is among the top 10 best detective novels of the decade according to the Sunday Times.