Sweet Narcissus

INTRODUCING WINSTON MARLOWE SHERMAN...

By day, he's a bulky, suede-elbowed Shakespeare professor with subversively nontraditional notions. By night, he hunches over his trusty, rusty old Underwood typewriter and secretly becomes Henrietta Slocum-a mystery novelist renowned for her swanky Gilded Age snooper, G. Winchester Hyde.

In 1953 Winston attends a star-studded party in honor of Dylan Thomas at the mansion of an acerbic theater critic, hoping to glean some atmosphere for his mysteries. He gets it in spades as the hilarity is shattered by the theft of the only extant original folio of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi-and murder most grisly.

Thirty years later the manuscript reappears-along with some guests who made that party a night to remember: a handsome, temperamental Irish actor and his exquisite, wayward wife; a coterie of tweedy academics; and a cast of cunning bit players whose backstage antics include a brutal slashing, vandalism, and extortion. This troupe transforms a quiet home into a bawdy house--where murder takes another curtain call. For Winston Sherman, life again imitates art as mystery comes home to roost--with a vengeance.