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