Jeremy Reed's novel is dedicated to Isidore Ducasse, the most mysterious writer of the 19th century, who called himself Comte de Lautréamont. Almost no evidence of the life of Lautréamont, whose works became world famous only almost half a century after his early death, has survived, and Jeremy Reed reconstructs the biography of the author of the Songs of Maldoror. The story of Isidore Ducasse himself is intertwined with the reports of the detective whom the hero's father, a French diplomat in Montevideo, hired to spy on the dissolute youth.