Book Summary and Reviews of Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru by Karen Lee Street

Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru by Karen Lee Street

Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru

A Poe and Dupin Mystery

by Karen Lee Street

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  • Published:
  • May 2018, 352 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Edgar Allan Poe and C. Auguste Dupin strive to unravel a mystery involving old enemies, lost soul-mates, ornithomancy, and the legendary jewel of Peru.

Philadelphia, 1844.  

As violent tensions escalate between nativists and recent Irish immigrants, Edgar Allan Poe's fears for the safety of his wife, Virginia, and mother-in-law, Muddy, are compounded when he receives a parcel of mummified bird parts. Has his nemesis returned to settle an old score? Just as odd is the arrival of Helena Loddiges, a young heiress who demands Poe's help to discover why her lover died at the city's docks on his return from an expedition to Peru. 

Poe is skeptical of her claims of having received messages from birds - and visitations from her lover's ghost - but when Miss Loddiges is kidnapped, he and his friend C. Auguste Dupin must unravel a mystery involving old enemies, lost soulmates, ornithomancy, and the legendary jewel of Peru.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Excellent... Street enhances the Grand Guignol plot with a plausible and empathetic portrayal of her lead." - Publishers Weekly

"Street successfully combines historical fact with fiction. A particular treat for fans of the master of the macabre." - Booklist

"Street excels at seamlessly joining history and fiction, displaying a literary style not unlike Poe's, complete with touches of the macabre and melodramatic...Fans of Poe and Dupin will look forward to more adventures of the detecting duo." - Library Journal

"A bit like the newly imagined Sherlock Holmes movies: a dose of drama, a dash of darkness, and a little bit of humor ultimately liven up the journey." - Kirkus

This information about Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Karen Lee Street

Karen Lee Street spent her earliest years in an 18th century Pennsylvanian farmhouse with far too many things that went bump in the night. Consequently, she became a voracious reader of fairytales, mysteries, historical yarns (both true and untrue), and stories with a tinge of the Gothic.

Her debut mystery trilogy combines these elements and has been described as both literary historical crime and Gothic mystery. The protagonists are famed writer Edgar Allan Poe and his fictional creation, the ur-detective C. Auguste Dupin whose investigations take them to London in 1840; Philadelphia, 1844; and Paris, 1849.

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