Ken W. reviewed on 12/3/2009

Helpful Score: 2

As a bit of detective work on the circumstances around Poe's death, the research behind this novel could have fueled an interesting NYT Sunday Magazine piece or perhaps a paper in an academic journal. As a novel, it is deadly, with pacing that is truly glacial and dialogue that fairly clunks off the page (speech in the novel is so obviously targeted at reminder the reader who is related to who, etc., that it sounds like bad radio-play dialogue from the forties). Plotwise, the author was apparently so constrained by the historical parameters he set for himself that nothing interesting was really ever allowed to happen. It's not often that I finish a book and groan (I'm much more likely to give up earlier) but for some reason I stuck this one out and was heartily disappointed.

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