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Also by Matthew Pearl:

Save Our Souls, January 2025
Hardcover / e-Book
The Dante Chamber, June 2018
Hardcover / e-Book
The Dante Club, June 2006
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
The Poe Shadow, May 2006
Hardcover

THE POE SHADOW
By: Matthew Pearl

The Secrets of Edgar Allan Poe's Last Hours...

Random House
May 2006
384 pages
ISBN: 1400061032
Hardcover
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Fiction | Mystery

“I present to you . . . the truth about this man’s death and my life.”

Baltimore, 1849. The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The public, the press, and even Poe’s own family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who met a disgraceful end as a drunkard. Everyone, in fact, seems to believe this except a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark, an ardent admirer who puts his own career and reputation at risk in a passionate crusade to salvage Poe’s.

As Quentin explores the puzzling circumstances of Poe’s demise, he discovers that the writer’s last days are riddled with unanswered questions the police are possibly willfully ignoring. Just when Poe’s death seems destined to remain a mystery, and forever sealing his ignominy, inspiration strikes Quentin–in the form of Poe’s own stories. The young attorney realizes that he must find the one person who can solve the strange case of Poe’s death: the real-life model for Poe’s brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of ingenious tales of crime and detection.

In short order, Quentin finds himself enmeshed in sinister machinations involving political agents, a female assassin, the corrupt Baltimore slave trade, and the lost secrets of Poe’s final hours. With his own future hanging in the balance, Quentin Clark must turn master investigator himself to unchain his now imperiled fate from that of Poe’s.

Media Buzz

Weekend Edition Sunday - July 9, 2006
Good Morning America - July 3, 2006
CBS Sunday Morning - May 28, 2006