When a string of savage murders terrorises the jewellers of Louis XIV's Paris, an elderly poet becomes an unlikely sleuth. Mademoiselle de Scuderi is one of the earliest and finest detective stories ever written.
First published in 1819, this gripping tale of crime, obsession, and justice predates Poe and Conan Doyle, and unfolds amid the perfumed intrigue of seventeenth-century France. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776 – 1822), the Königsberg-born jurist and composer, was a central figure of German Romanticism and a pioneer of the mystery form.