In the spring of 1928, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was summoned to Brooklyn by his wife, Sonia, to help her set up a hat shop. They receive an unexpected invitation to attend the wedding of their friends James F. Morton and Pearl K. Merritt. But the unthinkable occurs in the pre-wedding dinner, held at a hotel in Far Rockaway: a woman is found murdered, and Pearl is the prime suspect! Both Howard and Sonia leap into the task of clearing her name and finding the real culprit-and in the process find themselves enmeshed in a complex imbroglio involving organized crime, death threats, and general mayhem. This first novel of the "H. P. Lovecraft, Detective" series shows the great writer of weird fiction transforming himself into something of a hard-boiled detective, relentlessly pursuing the truth in spite of all the dangers surrounding him, while Sonia tells the tale and seeks to protect her reckless husband from injury or death. Lovecraft solves the case with a combination of keen intelligence, boldness, and a little help from his favorite species-cats.