Amazon.com: The Mask of Red Death: Harold Schechter: Books

Amazon.com
With a cannibalistic mountain man menacing New York City in 1845, who better to curb the butcher's appetites--permanently--than the one man perhaps best prepared to understand his macabre nature: Edgar Allan Poe? That's right, the same impecunious poet and editor who was responsible for "The Raven," and has appeared in two previous historical thrillers by Harold Schechter (1999's Nevermore and 2001's The Hum Bug), returns in The Mask of Red Death to stop a serial slayer known for first scalping his victims, then (yikes!) consuming their warm livers. With Manhattanites in a vengeful frenzy, ready to string up just about anyone conceivably to blame for these atrocities (even an indolent Crow Indian chief living among showman P.T. Barnum's stock of human attractions), it falls to Poe--who is connected to at least two of the victims--to find and foil the fiend.

Fortunately, this faint-hearted versifier has the help of renowned western scout Christopher "Kit" Carson, who's come east with his mute, 5-year-old son on the trail of a red-headed renegade known as "Liver-Eating" Johnson--the killer of Carson's Arapaho wife. Is Johnson to blame for all of Gotham's recent barbarity? Or is there another hand behind the destruction not only of young girls, but of a wealthy albino who'd asked Poe to authenticate a document of historical and political import, and an author who had taken umbrage at Poe's lampooning of his work? Schechter, known for his true-crime books as well as his mysteries, is unsparing in his explications of violence. Yet it's in the service of re-creating pre-Civil War New York's frequently dangerous conditions, and ensuring that no plot turn is less than perilous. Poe shows here both a brilliant mind (he seems to have committed an entire thesaurus to memory) and a beleaguered spirit (he must do without physical intimacy from his "ethereal" but sickly wife, who also happens to be his young cousin, and he struggles against his weakness for alcohol). The combination makes him a truly singular sleuth, whether he is facing thugs determined to wreck Barnum's American Museum, or trading trivialities with a ventriloquist who proves to be no dummy. If only Carson were so well developed; instead, he comes off in Red Death as a B-movie extra, sidling onto the scene whenever an altercation is in the offing. Western history buffs will recognize the liberties Schechter has taken with facts surrounding Carson and Johnson, but that shouldn't spoil their appreciation of the raucous drama and rich wit to be found in these pages. --J. Kingston Pierce

From Publishers Weekly
Set in 1845 Manhattan, veteran true-crime author Schechter's third competent Edgar Allan Poe mystery (after 1999's Nevermore and 2001's The Hum Bug) again pairs the writer with a celebrity of the day, here legendary mountain man Kit Carson. A series of murders in which the killer scalps his prey leads an outraged populace to focus on a Native American, Chief Wolf Bear, serving as a sideshow attraction for P.T. Barnum, but Carson arrives on the scene in time to prevent a lynching and help amateur sleuth Poe and the police pick up the real trail. Poe ends up stumbling upon several corpses, including that of a mysterious albino who had sought his expertise in verifying the authenticity of a document represented to be of great historical and political significance. Schechter has improved his plotting and pacing skills since Nevermore, which teamed Poe with Davy Crockett, and he vividly depicts real-life mountain man John Johnson, a vicious Indian killer who liked to eat his victims' livers raw. Overall, though, the book's period detail, characterization and level of suspense aren't in the same class as comparable elements in Caleb Carr's The Alienist, which used a similar quest for a human monster to paint a more sophisticated picture of 19th-century New York.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

The Mask of Red Death (Hardcover)

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought