Fata Morgana

From the flaps of the Knopf first edition: "In Fata Morgana a celebrated novelist turns conjurer to bring us a supremely theatrical magic show - a rich exotic entertainment of crime, treble-trickery, and legerdermain, with Europe as its stage and the golden leaders of the Uppercrust and the Underworld as its players. The time and place are Paris, 1861 - the extravagant capital of Louis Napoleon and his Empress Eugenie, the gaudy, blatant public arena of Great Whores and fabulous charlatans; the treacherous private labyrinth of Police Inspector Paul Picard and the human prey he stalks. Picard is a hunter of the purest instincts, with an appetite for the ladies, a taste for lemon tarts, and a policeman's nose for hard realities. As the book opens he is on his way to the Opera, for music and murder: among the guests is as elegant a killer as ever sliced his way through Parisian high society, and on his arm is the young woman he means to decapitate tonight. A strange encounter with them precipitates Picard into a new and (apparently) trivial assignment - a case that is fated to disrupt and then transform, irrevocably, his life. At first it seems routine: a man - Ric Lazare - has recently arrived in Paris and in a short time has captured the jaded attention and the favors of the entire city. His aura of opulence, his bewitching wife, Rene, and, above all, his unearthly fortune-telling machine have won him entree to the salons (and the bank vaults) of the most dazzling leaders of society, including, it is whispered, the Emperor himself. But, who - and what - is Lazare? Is he a crook? A master of illusions? A real magician? Or - more terrible - a reincarnation from an Older World? To find the answer, Picard must follow the thread of the man's past. His quest takes him from Paris to Vienna, Nuremberg, Budapest, and on to the dark, menacing valleys and steppes of eastern Hungary, uncovering a trail of deceit and violent death: a fabled toy maker driven to destroy himself and a lifetime's priceless creations... a man ruthlessly killed over a dice game... a beautiful woman purchased at auction, then stolen away... the sudden death of a priest. Beset by intimations of his own mortality, by a sense of inexplicable entrapment in a malign world of mechanical and deadly playthings, by a slowly suffocating conviction that he is undertaking a journey he has made before, Picard, caught up in the quickening pace, returns to Paris - and to a terrifying confrontation with his quarry and his own destiny."