Midway through his triumphant lecture tour of the American West, English writer Oscar Wilde discovers that someone in his entourage has been savagely murdering prostitutes. U.S. Marshal Robert Grigsby - gruff, resolute, and occasional sober - suspects Oscar. And so the flamboyant esthete, determined to clear his name, sets out to reveal the madman's identity by what he calls "a systematic application of the poetic imagination".

Before he finally confronts the killer, Wilde conducts a passionate affair with the fiancee of the most powerful man in Colorado; samples the pleasures of opium; finds himself stalked by a brutal, bearlike buffalo hunter; and shares an occasional drink with Doc Holliday, gunman and gambler. A tense mystery, a perverse comedy, Wilde West is a brilliant novel that includes, as all books should, murder, sex, insanity, cannibalism and a herd of goats.