In the lush, uninhibited atmosphere of Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson is languishing with the disease that will soon kill him; when a chance encounter with the mysterious Scottish missionary, Mr Baker, turns his thoughts back to his conservative, post-Reformation Edinburgh home. As Stevenson's meetings with the tantalizingly nebulous missionary become increasingly strange, a series of crimes against the native population sours the atmosphere. With its playful nod to Stevenson's life and work Manguel has woven an intoxicating tale in which fantasy infiltrates reality, repressed desires take-on physical form, dreams become nightmares, and endings are both inevitable and surprising. This is the first of several novellas featuring deceased literary figures at the heart of a murder mystery: based on a highly acclaimed Brazilian series entitled Death or Literature. New fiction in this occasional series comes from Louise Welsh (on Christopher Marlowe) and Bernardo Carvalho (Fear of de Sade - June 2004).