Summer, 1849. When Edgar Allan Poe travels to Paris to help his friend Auguste Dupin hunt down the elusive criminal who bought Dupin's family to ruin during the French Revolution, the detective duo is engaged by the police to recover the stolen letter of an infamous Parisian salonnière. Is the thief one of the literary greats who attend her salons, or is it the man who is scheming to become the Emperor of France? In this third book in the series (after Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru), the poet and the sleuth are quickly embroiled in a chase that takes them to the tunnels of the city's necropolis, where few ever return from the darkness.