Futures broker Ellerslie Penrose stumbles on to the strange story of a Victorian escape artist named Palmer who continues to cheat death.

"Imagine Raymond Chandler filing from New Zealand with a little help from Anne Rice and Jean-Paul Sartre, and you're still not close to imagining the oddity of this weird, wonderful novel. Taylor's structural instincts are so unerring and his tersely elegant language so seductive that the story never once falters - even as it morphs from a murder mystery into an exploration of passion and mortality." (Entertainment Weekly)

"A fascinating and obsessive novel from New Zealand… Ellerslie Penrose, a part-time futures broker, finds a junkie's body in an Auckland dumpster, steals his wallet and embarks on a hallucinatory journey into the shadow life of the dead man. This brings him into contact with fantasy bordellos, mysterious manuscripts, bizarre antiques dealers, and a sleazy nest of quirky happenstance. Oddly detached from its subject matter, this is as hypnotic as they come; it's also miles away from the conventions of your average country-cottage crime or pig-headed cop yarn. One for the connoisseurs." (The Guardian)