Since Edgar Allan Poe sees things that are not there, hears voices others cannot, and feels utterly at home in the realm of human darkness, he is the perfect detective to unravel cases of the murderous and the macabre. In "Edgar Poe and the Concord Killer" Poe's old friend, P. T. Barnum, implores the wordsmith to take his wife, Virginia "Sissy" Poe, to Boston to secure an urgent medical cure (and while he is there to please acquire the showman some particularly garish crime-scene evidence for his American Museum in Manhattan!). The crime in question is the recent butchery of a beautiful young shop girl. Once in Boston, Poe quickly surmises the sensational murder is only one in a string of inexplicable killings, centered in shadowy pool of deceit and ghoulish depravity. Poe finds himself leading a frantic investigation with the assistance of a highly unusual girl named Louisa May Alcott, whose innocence belies her own fascination with the dark side. As his wife's health falters and a city panics, Poe pursues a strange circle of suspects. He must now see what others cannot: the invisible bonds that tie seemingly unrelated cases together–and the truth that lies behind the ghastly disguise of a serial killer. From the narcoleptic Henry David Thoreau to the four charming Alcott sisters at home, "Edgar Poe and the Concord Killer" brings to life nineteenth-century New York and Boston and Concord a world of intellectuals, charlatans, discoverers, dupes, daguerreotypists, and amateur morticians. As Poe comes closer to unraveling the fiendish riddle, the poet must admit at last that he is up against a fellow genius–a genius not of words, but of death.