Just before Christmas at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, Wilde presents Sir Arthur Cohan Doyle with a manuscript detailing his lecture tour in America during which he met Louisa May Alcott, P.T. Barnum and Jumbo the Elephant among others. Wilde has become enchanted with a touring group of actors, headed by his long, adored hero Edmond LaGrange. When the LaGranges return to England, Wilde is with them. He finds a dead poodle in a trunk upon arriving in Liverpool, a harbinger of things to come.

Wilde follows the LaGranges to Paris where they are taken into the inner circle of celebrities such as Sarah Bernhardt. He ultimately meets his biographer and companion Robert Sherard. In Paris LaGrange’s dresser, Washington Traquair, is murdered followed by several other members of the troupe and Oscar decides his keen powers of observation are in order.

The story, being told ten years after the events occurred, jumps from London to America to London to Paris at a dizzying pace. Wilde is a very colorful character, impressed by the famous people he meets as he is not one of them at this point in time. His American tour, while entertaining, doesn’t add a lot to the plot of the story, though it gives him circumstances to encounter LaGrange and his troupe. 

Careful readers will be looking for parallels and connections to Hamlet as this is the play LaGrange and his troupe are performing in Paris. Since several of the murders are locked room in nature the question of suicide does arise, though the solution is fairly obvious. The plot is clever and, while very detailed about Wilde’s travels, many of the details of his personal life, now well-known, are left unspoken. The grandeur and opulence of Paris in the late 1800s is well described, and the parties and Wilde himself are described so vividly that readers will feel as if they are part of the action.                                                     

--Jennifer Monahan Winberry